


On Falling In Love & Other Curses

by callaina



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Blood and Violence, Canonical Minor Character Death, Curses, Eventual Happy Ending, Falling In Love, Fluff, Food, Gardening, M/M, Magic, Murder... Kind Of, Pratical Magic (1998) Inspired
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:52:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 36,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24439987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callaina/pseuds/callaina
Summary: After his parents' death, Iruka goes to live with his two uncles in a little town called Leafwood. Their house has nooks here, and little crannies there, a wonderful garden, and the oven in the kitchen is always preparing something tasty and warm. Life is far from perfect but Iruka is very loved, and when one day a boy called Tenzou appears in the forest behind their home, their family expands naturally.There's just this very tiny fleck on Iruka's family history... a curse that destines the one Iruka falls in love with to die.How rude is that?
Relationships: Hatake Kakashi/Umino Iruka, Senju Hashirama/Uchiha Madara, Umino Iruka & Yamato | Tenzou
Comments: 87
Kudos: 177
Collections: KakaIru Mini Bang 2020





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

> a multi-chaptered fic? by me? *vibrates from excitement and nerves but above all from excitement*
> 
> this fic was written specifically for the KakaIru Mini Bang 2020 with the themes of Urban Legends and Soulmates. it is loosely inspired by the movie Practical Magic (1998) which i have never seen, nor have i read the book so i cannot exactly judge how close it is to the original.
> 
> this fic is fully planned out and i expect it to have three to four chapters in total, they just have to be written :--) i hope that all of you are well, and please enjoy this little story that's taken up many of my waking hours <3

Often, a mere seed is enough to grow into a tree so big that you cannot wrap your arms around the trunk anymore. The tree is a living, a breathing thing that needs little direction, neither from human nor fae, to keep reaching and stretching its arms skywards. It becomes beautiful. It becomes sturdy. It becomes rough with bark. Sometimes, it becomes sick and it is no one’s fault. Sometimes, it becomes sick and the sickness festers in its roots and climbs into the tree’s crown and is only noticed when someone sets an end to its life, revealing rotting tree rings, one after the other.

Stories are like that, sometimes. It takes only one pair of feet to stumble over it, to pick it up, to have it cradled, for it to start growing. Into what it will grow, we won’t know. But as the story is passed around from one hand to another, from one heart to another, it lingers in people’s minds. It can grow into a story that is beyond this world’s capacity; it can grow into a story that festers although it would much rather be forgotten. Sometimes, stories are lies, and sometimes they are truths, and sometimes they are a little bit of both. It is dangerous to tell a story. And it is even more dangerous to try and divert from its course.

Stories tend to tell themselves.

One day, many years and many more moons ago, a woman stood in the middle of a marketplace of a common township. Sentenced to burn at the stake, flames licked at the soles of her feet. The civilians around her shouted and yelled, called her a witch. They believed a story, neither truth nor lie, and wanted to see the girl, for she was still young, only having borne her first child a fortnight ago, die. As the crowd yowled, she spat a course at the one who had betrayed and denounced her for her gifts, the father of her child, the man she had believed to love.

“I curse you, I curse all of my children, my grandchildren, this bloodline – may the one you fall in love with _die_ ,” she screamed, while the mass around her roared in excitement of having Death follow their invitation, and come into their little parish.

The woman died. And so did the man that had betrayed her, only a few days later, by the sickness that soon came for the whole country. Jealous of her cleverness and talents for the natural world that he did not possess, could not possess for he came from a family all too human, the Plague devoured the man’s body. As one story died, another one came to life.

On a rainy night in May, a fruitful and humid, a heavy month, a boy was born to a mother and father. They loved him dearly, and the boy felt their love, and he grew into a bright little thing. But their story had already been written, and when Umino Iruka was eight years old, his mother was taken by a sickness that had the boy thinking off so much White, the white of the hospital rooms, the white of the starched linen on her bed, the ashen tone of her skin as medicine dripped into her, medicine that was supposed to help but only seemed to make her worse. After a short but fierce fight his mother died. Inexplicable Grief took his father not long after.

The boy was too young to experience this kind of loss, and he should have been too young to know that the people in their town had begun to call it a blood curse that followed his family’s line. But he knew. Of course, he knew. For many years ago the witch had been Iruka, and Iruka had been the witch, and this is not a lie. Listen to Iruka’s story and listen closely: Because Iruka’s story is unlike many others; because Iruka tried to change the story and tell it himself.

~*~*~

Iruka watched his uncles’ house appear at the end of the road and fiddled with his seatbelt.

In the backseat the last remains of his old room sat in one cardboard box with big letters on it. The size of the letters varied, some a little wonkier than others, others leaning more to the side than some, but they were still legible. It read the following:

THIS IS MINE (IRUKA UMINO)!!! DONT OPEN!!!

Underneath, there was a drawing of a dragon spitting pink fire.

Iruka turned to look over his shoulder for the tenth time to check whether the box was still were there. The bold sharpie warning on the carton filled him with an unimaginable thrill because he was forbidding _Adults_ from looking in there. And they had to _Listen._ Because even a child had a right to p-r-i-v-a-c-y, one of his uncles had explained to him.

The truck rolled over a speedbump. Although they were going slow, the whole car shook and Iruka took off from his seat a little.

Truly, he didn’t have anything to hide in the boxes. Well, maybe Iruka wasn’t so keen on sharing the seal plushie his mom had given him for his last birthday after they had taken a trip to a seal rescue station. He was eight so he didn’t _need_ a plushie to sleep with him anymore, but it had white fur and was very soft. And apart from that, the house he had lived in with his parents would be sold next week, so Iruka couldn’t have left it at home anyway.

“Uncle Madara?”

His uncle didn’t take his eyes off the road as he rolled into the driveway, car coming to a standstill, and put on the handbrake with a yank. “Hm?”

Iruka unbuckled his seatbelt. “Why didn’t uncle Hashirama come with us?”

Madara tapped his fingers against the steering wheel once, twice, three times as the motor of the truck started on his array of noises that meant the engine was cooling down.

He looked at Iruka out of the corner of his eyes, unsmiling. “I think it is very hard for him to see the house your mother spent most of her life in. He doesn’t want to take away from your sadness by being sad, too.”

Iruka wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but he had been scared of Madara in the beginning. He was six when his mother first fell ill, and seven when his parents wanted him to stay with Hashirama for a longer while. Until he wasn’t staying at home anymore with a few days spending it at his uncles’, but rather staying at his uncles’ with a few days at home in-between.

While Hashirama was one of those adults that always smiled, and always laughed at all of Iruka’s jokes, and managed to make Iruka laugh even when he didn’t want to, Iruka’s uncle Madara was a quiet person. Iruka sometimes had the impression that Madara didn’t want like anyone, didn’t want anyone around him, but Hashirama called that his ‘resting grumpy face’. And Iruka knew a bit about being grumpy, too. For example, Iruka knew that he could be grumpy after having visited his mom at the hospital when she had one of her Bad Days and that he didn’t want to talk to anyone then. When Iruka asked Hashirama whether Madara had a Sick Mom, Hashirama had just stared at him, smile slipping off, and sank to his knees to give him a hug.

In the end, Iruka found out that his uncle didn’t have a Sick Mom but a Dead Brother and that, Iruka thought, was maybe a bit worse than a Sick Mom. But then his Sick Mom had turned into a Dead Mom, so he figured that brought him a bit closer to his uncle even if a mother wasn’t the same as a sibling.

One time, Iruka had looked into the mirror and ruffled through his hair to make it look like Madara’s jet-black locks and tugged the corners of his mouth down with his fingers. He scowled at his mirror image. His father had just died, and he thought that the grumpy face already came a bit easier to him.

What he liked a lot about Madara was that he never lied.

Iruka pursed his lips. “Doesn’t he know that we can both be sad?”

Madara let go off the steering wheel. “He doesn’t want us to worry about him when there is you.”

“Well,” Iruka opened the truck’s door and shuffled in his seat so his legs dangled over the edge of it, “I have to talk to him then.”

Iruka didn’t see it because his back was towards his uncle, but Madara’s lips gave the tiniest twitch.

Madara watched Iruka climbing out of the truck on his own, not trying to intervene or lend him a hand, because he remembered how Iruka had once fiercely told Hashirama off for helping him when he hadn’t Asked For Help.

“Do you want to carry your box?”

Iruka considered this. It was his box. But it was also heavy. “If I ask you to carry it, you won’t look in there, right?”

Madara crossed his fingers over his chest, right where his heart sat.

Iruka nodded. “Okay. Can you carry the box up? And can I go to the garden?”

The truck gave a row of loud clicking noises, but neither Iruka nor Madara bat an eyelash. Madara threw the pair of sunglasses on top of his head onto the driver’s seat when he reached for the boxes. “Tell your uncle I’m in the study and that dinner will be ready at six.”

Iruka bounded off.

Hashirama was crouching next to a patch of spring onions when Iruka crashed into him.

“Hey, hey, ‘Ruka!”

He laughed, such a warm and pleasant sound that Iruka tightened his arms around him even as they tumbled to the ground. The kerchief on his head was half pushed off when Hashirama straightened again. “I didn’t even hear the car!”

“That’s because you’re in the garden and you forget _everything_ when you’re in the g –“ Iruka broke off into a set of giggles as Hashirama fingers found all the places where he might have been a little ticklish.

“Stop!” he screamed with laughter and launched a counterattack when Hashirama let up on him.

“Noooo, no tickling the adults!”

Hashirama set off in a run, first in a straight line over the plaster that had been set between the vegetable patches, and then in a zig-zag as his feet touched upon grass. Iruka followed him with outstretched hands. “Uncle Madara isn’t ticklish!”

“No tickling _this_ adult!” Hashirama exclaimed but slowed down so Iruka had a chance to catch him.

After Iruka had successfully tickled-this-adult, and tickled at least a few tears out of his uncle, they both stared up at the blue sky, sweaty backs pressing into the earth. “Uncle Madara says dinner is ready at six,” Iruka said.

“Bless my husband.” Hashirama wiped a dirty hand over his forehead and Iruka started to laugh, pointing at his uncle’s muddy hands when Hashirama shot him a questioning look.

“You need a bath,” Iruka giggled.

Hashirama gasped. “I need a bath? We both need one, love.”

“But I’m not dirty!”

A dirty thumb wiped over Iruka’s cheek before he could protest. “Now you’re dirty.”

Iruka whined and grumbled, but quickly forgot what he whined and grumbled about when Hashirama nudged his shoulder and pointed at a cloud. “Look, that’s a pancake.”

Really, it was only vaguely circle-shaped. Iruka thought it looked more like a potato. “That’s one of your pancakes when you try to make them.”

Hashirama let his arm sink and looked over at Iruka. “You’ll be such a smartass when you go through puberty.”

Iruka only had a very vague idea about puberty, just about as much as Hashirama’s pancakes were round.

Later, when Iruka and Hashirama stood in front of the bathroom mirror – Iruka on a little wooden step stool, Hashirama barefoot on the white floor tiles – they brushed their teeth, pulling faces at each other. Iruka’s hair was still damp from his bath but he had refused a towel because he liked to shake the water off like a dog. He looked up at his uncle, and wondered what people meant when they said Iruka looked exactly like him. If that meant he’d grow as tall as Hashirama, though, Iruka didn’t want to complain.

“Don’t forget the back teeth.”

Iruka rolled his eyes.

“Bottom _and_ top.”

“Yeeee-eeesh!” Iruka whined, mouth still very much occupied and shot his uncle a glare. Hashirama only smiled and dropped a towel on the top of his head just as Iruka put away his toothbrush.

Settling into his bed, Iruka’s gaze was drawn to the glowing stars on the ceiling. As always, he counted them, making sure that there were exactly nineteen looking down on him as he slept. In his arm, there was the plush seal. It smelled a bit dusty, but it also smelled like his old house.

“I don’t think I want a story tonight,” he whispered without looking at Hashirama, who knelt next to his bed. Usually, when there wasn’t a book that Iruka wanted to read on his own, one of his uncles came to tell him a story. While Hashirama’s stories always revolved around an imaginary town where magic was as natural as water, Madara told him about all sorts of animals, wolves that could speak, or cats that were as much shadow as they were feline. Iruka didn’t have the heart to tell Hashirama that Madara’s stories were just a little better than his.

“Are you sure?” Hashirama asked. His eyes had turned a little sad, so Iruka nodded and exaggerated a yawn. “I am really tired so I think I’m gonna fall right asleep.”

Hashirama watched him, his hand resting on the washed-out duvet with a washed-out flower pattern, before drawing it up to Iruka’s head. “Alright. I love you, ‘Ruka.”

“I love you too,” Iruka replied and did not bat his uncle’s hands away. “Tell uncle Madara I love him too,” he added quickly before drawing the duvet over his chin.

Hashirama smiled again, and planted a kiss on his forehead. “Door closed or open?”

“Closed, please.”

When Hashirama left, Iruka rolled over.

All his books were here. The shells he had collected at the beach last summer lay on the windowsill. Pictures of him, together with his parents, hung over the desk, where Iruka had scattered all his crayons, the purple down to barely half an inch.

Iruka buried his face into the seal’s fur.

This was it. He would never go home again.

~*~*~

The door to his uncles’ bedroom was open when he shuffled into it. A lamp in the shape of a moon gave off a warm light, not too bright to disturb someone’s sleep, but enough to throw an otherworldly glow against the walls.

Madara noticed first.

“Iruka?” He shuffled the cover away from his body as he sat up. Hashirama lay next to him, curled up into a bundle, sleeping tightly.

Iruka was crying. “Is it my fault?”

It took Madara a second to understand what Iruka meant but then he reached out his hands. “Touching?” It was Madara’s casual but clear way to ask whether Iruka was okay to be touched right now. Iruka scrubbed over his face as his tears rolled over his cheeks and down his chin, and he nodded. “It’s my fault. I know it’s my fault,” he cried as Madara lifted him up under his armpits and onto the bed.

“Iruka, it is not your fault that your parents died.” He moved Iruka’s hair away from his splotchy red face, and rubbed a hand over Iruka’s back, helping him get his breathing under control.

“Maybe if I had loved them more, or – “ Iruka hiccupped, “had listened more then they would still be here, and you didn’t have to,” a sharp breath in, “take me to live with you when you didn’t even want to.”

Movement behind Madara indicated that Hashirama was waking up.

“Iruka, listen to me.” Madara’s voice was stern as he spoke. “You have done nothing wrong. _Nothing_. And we want you here.”

“’Ruka?” Hashirama slowly rose, a solid weight against Madara’s chest, and looked over his shoulder. As soon as he realised that Iruka was crying, though, he shifted forward, pulling Iruka further towards them, face full of concern.

“’Ruka, what’s going on?”

Iruka clutched at both their shirts and just cried harder. “My fault,” he repeated, the words barely escaping in between his sobs.

Hashirama turned his face towards Madara, as his own eyes were already filling with tears. “Iruka,“ he started but choked up.

“Do you know how loved you are, Iruka?” Madara asked.

Hashirama pressed Iruka closer to his chest. In the dim light, his body looked so small. So frail. And Hashirama started crying in earnest. “We love you _so much_ , Iruka. We love you to the moon and back. We love you, and we are glad you are here. We want you here.” His tears dropped onto Iruka’s hair, but Madara made no move to wipe them away, his hands still on Iruka’s back.

“And your mom, your dad, they love you just as much, ‘Ruka. Okay? Can you nod so I know you hear me?”

Another sob shook Iruka’s shoulders, but he nodded, wringing the fabric of Hashirama’s shirt tighter in his fists.

As Madara and Hashirama held their nephew through the worst of it, all the while whispering what Iruka needed to hear so desperately, Iruka cried and cried. He felt like a tiny door had opened inside his chest, and that he would drown in his own tears if he could. When his head started to hurt, a cold washcloth was gently dragged across his face. Someone put a glass to Iruka’s lips and he took careful sips of water, his eyes mostly closed, a fine tremor running through him now and then.

“You want to sleep here tonight?” Hashirama asked.

“Yes,” Iruka whispered.

The mattress moved as Madara got out of the bed. “I’ll get you a new shirt.”

As he lay down with one uncle on each of his sides, Iruka felt lighter. And Iruka thought, he loved his uncles, he really did. But he was also scared, because if you loved someone or something that meant that they could also get hurt.

~*~*~

Iruka was nine when they found Tenzou.

He had never quite understood what Madara’s job was. Hashirama had told him that he looked after the wild animals in the forest that bordered on the town, and occasionally Madara brought home an injured bird, sometimes even a hawk, and one time a deer whose mother had been killed.

Was he a veteran, one of those doctors that look after animals? Iruka had asked.

A veterinarian? No, not exactly. But he does take care of them when they don’t have anyone else to look after them, Hashirama explained and promptly asked Iruka to hand him some of the dried rosemary from the lower shelf in the kitchen.

On a particularly sunny Saturday morning, when Iruka had finished all of his homework, tidied his room, helped Hashirama set the dough for when they wanted to bake a pie with apples from the garden, he saw Madara step onto the veranda from the window in his room and made a decision.

“Careful!” Hashirama called form the kitchen as Iruka ran down the stairs and out the backdoor.

“Madara!”

Iruka had stopped calling them ‘uncle Hashirama’ and ‘uncle Madara’ a few months after permanently living with them.

Madara stopped, and turned around. He was dressed in all black despite the sun beating down on them, and the top half of his hair was tied back from his face, giving Iruka good view of his eyes, red as blood. His long earrings glistened and dangled as he looked at Iruka.

Iruka had seen his uncle’s eyes plenty of times. He wasn’t _scared._ He was a bit afraid that Madara would say no, though. “Can I come with you?”

Madara seemed to contemplate this. “Are you alright to stay quiet when I need you to today?”

“Yes!” Iruka yelled, excitement rushing through him, before reining his response in a bit and stemming his hands in his hips. The posture prompted a smile out of Madara. He gestured back to the house. “Go get your backpack with something to drink and tell your uncle.”

When Iruka was ready, they stepped off the garden, following a little trail that wasn’t as much a trail but a narrow line of flattened grass. But Iruka didn’t notice this, as he was happy to trail after Madara, humming a song. “I don’t have to be quiet right now, right?”

Madara shook his head. “No. I’ll tell you when we both have to be quiet.”

As they both made their way deeper into the forest, the crowns of the trees above them clutching at each other, the patches of blue sky above grew smaller and smaller. As always, when Madara brought his nephew with him, which had happened a handful of times now, the trees bent down curiously to look after the boy, stirred into waking by his joyful feet skipping over stones and branches.

Madara took the lead only because he knew that what was in front could be much more dangerous than what was in the back.

“Do you sometimes wish you could fly?”

Madara looked over his shoulder, careful not to step off the trail. A shrub of rowanberries grew to the right, an unusual sight in the middle of the forest, but then nothing was exactly usual here. Madara picked off a branch and tugged them in his pocket, handing some to Iruka to do the same.

“I don’t think so,” Madara replied.

“But why?”

“I like the thought that birds have the sky to themselves. That’s important, that everyone has their own place where they are allowed to be themselves.”

Iruka looked down at his feet. That sounded true, he guessed. But if there was a chance… maybe if he could turn into a bird for just a day and see the world from above, see what came beyond the town and the forest…

A gust of wind rushed past them and yanked at Iruka’s shirt. “Woah!”

Madara’s hair flew up, and he shielded part of his face, stopping and keeping another hand behind his back, for Iruka to take.

When the wind died down, a soft chiming rang through the air. Iruka gripped his uncle’s hands and craned his neck. He didn’t remember any windbells hanging from the trees. Apart from that, they sounded different from the ones they had on their veranda, the source of it unclear, the chiming carrying to Iruka from every direction.

“Madara,” Iruka whispered and pressed closer to his leg. “That’s – “

“Shh,” Madara shushed him. He didn’t say anything for a moment, listening to the chiming, before –

Grass started sprouting where there had just been a path in front of Madara’s feet, growing and growing, until Iruka was standing in a knee-high patch of green. Iruka looked down, and the blades began to flutter and shake as a single lilac butterfly emerged from the patch, then a second, a third, until the number continued to grow rapidly, a haze of purple obscuring Iruka’s view.

The butterflies didn’t seem to have a goal apart from escaping into the sky from wherever they came from, but they stretched their wings, and where the wings touched his skin, it hurt. He bit down on a cry, more shocked than in pain, but Madara didn’t falter and let his free hand come ablaze with flames. As quickly as the butterflies emerged, they escaped in the presence of the searing fire Madara had summoned, and when the last one was out of sight, Madara tugged at Iruka and crouched down.

“Are you _hurt_?”

Iruka showed his arms, because that’s where his skin was exposed, and although the wings had felt like tiny papercuts, his skin was unscathed, the same brown tone as Hashirama’s.

“Someone is trying to talk to us,” Iruka said, then, and Madara’s eyes widened in surprise. Iruka caught a glimpse of where their path was supposed to be, leading them further into forest. “I don’t think they want us to be here.”

Madara’s features settled back into their place. The wind had unsettled his hair, and half of his face was hidden behind his dark locks again. Hashirama said that he liked to hide behind it, but Iruka thought it protected Madara by keeping others out. But maybe those two weren’t so different.

“It is not for them to decide who walks this forest.”

Madara’s voice left no room for arguments.

“I need to see the clearing first, and then we will head back.”

Iruka frowned. He hadn’t expected this adventure to end so soon, not when things had just started to get interesting. But then again, this was a little above what he was used to. Madara didn’t usually bring out the fire in front of Iruka.

The chiming had stopped when they set off again.

As the trees grew closer to another, the already dim light grew dark. But there, at the end of Iruka’s sight was the clearing Madara had talked of, and they were headed straight to it. From afar, Iruka already made out a shape on the ground and at first he wondered if it was a group of mushrooms, those big and colourful ones he had seen the first time Madara let him accompany him, the ones that also gave off a faint glow, light blue, in the dark.

But after a few more steps, Iruka realised that it wasn’t a group of mushrooms, and it wasn’t any other type of plant.

And as the metallic smell of blood exploded in his nose, he knew that things were really, really wrong. Iruka set off in a sprint.

It was a child. They had brown hair, like Iruka, but their skin was pale, so pale, a contrast against the freckles that looked like someone had sprinkled them on to their liking. The freckles were everywhere. Tiny brown dots. Their hair splayed out beneath their head like a halo, and Iruka screamed.

Blood oozed out of their throat – there was so much Red sinking into the moss, the soil beneath their body, and Iruka screamed. He screamed because there was a huge gash where the blood was rushing from, and they were alive, breath rasping wetly. They were alive, but dying.

He didn’t realise that it was Madara who seized him up from the ground and he thrashed against him, until Iruka heard his voice and stilled.

“ _Iruka. Iruka._ ”

Madara blocked the sight of the child from him and weighed down on Iruka’s shoulders with his hands. “Iruka. Go get Hashirama. Don’t stop, don’t get off the path. _Now._ ”

And Iruka ran.

~*~*~

The child said he was a boy.

When Madara asked him what name he could give him, he had simply said that he didn’t know.

He healed well, though. The slash across his throat didn’t leave a mark at all. Sometimes, Iruka wondered if he had imagined it, the Red – but how could someone imagine that much blood?

Madara burnt the clothes they found him in, and Hashirama asked if it was alright if the boy borrowed some of Iruka’s clothes. Needless to say, it was alright. He watched Hashirama take care of the wound with salves and a little bit of spark.

“I think my name is Tenzou,” the boy said one evening as he was sitting on the back porch with Iruka, trading pebbles they had collected from when Hashirama had broken up soil in the garden earlier and complained about all the stones coming up from the ground. Iruka had already forgotten his bellyache from eating too much of the pastéis de nata this morning, flakes of the puff pastry still sticking to his summer-blue shirt. But could he really be blamed when the custard, with the taste of vanilla, with a hint of cinnamon, might just be his favourite thing in the whole wide world?

(Madara had told him they were from a place called Portugal, where they were sold at every corner in confeitarias, and that they were even more delicious than the ones they could get here. Since then, Iruka liked to think about Portugal when falling asleep as if it was the land of milk and honey.)

“I like that name,” Iruka beamed and handed him a stone that was almost green in colour. “Hello Tenzou.”

Tenzou, who didn’t smile, just watched the world out of his dark-brown eyes as if he wanted to drink up every little detail, as if he wasn’t actually part of it, took the stone and closed his fingers around it. “Hi Iruka,” he responded after a while and ducked his head.

It wasn’t always as easy as this. There were questions of belonging, questions of _how_ and _from where_ and _why_. Hashirama and Madara got into a fight as Tenzou was in the garden choosing green and yellow zucchinis for dinner, and Iruka pressed close into the shadows of the alcove where Hashirama dried his herbs.

“So what, are you saying we send him back out?” Hashirama hissed. His face was flushed and he furiously chopped at the basil on the cutting board. Madara had his arms crossed in front of the chest and leaned against the kitchen table.

“I am saying that there will eventually be someone looking for him.”

“I don’t understand what you want me to do about this, Madara. He’s a child. He’s not going anywhere.”

Hashirama stopped chopping, and rinsed the knife under the kitchen sink, before resting it on the countertop. His shoulders were hunched up to his ears, tense, and taut.

“I understand that you care about him and that you want to protect him – “

“Like I should! Like anyone should about a child. I cannot believe that you would suggest otherwise when you more than _anyone_ should know exactly what it feels like.”

Madara gave a small exhale, barely a sigh. He didn’t move. The words hung heavy in the kitchen. Iruka imagined that if he’d step out, he could see them, tangible, and heavy, and that if he stretched onto his tiptoes he could grab and get rid of them. But from where he was hidden, he could only see Madara’s half-profile and Hashirama’s back with his favourite apron tied above his waist. Hashirama too had stilled. Only the noise of water drops falling from the faucet remained.

“You’re not listening to me. All I want to say is that we need to be prepared for when they come. I am going to step out for ten minutes because I am getting angry at you, and before you say something you’ll regret. But we need to talk about this, whether you like it or not.” With his hand on the backdoor handle, Madara sent a look towards Hashirama but he was only staring at the sink. Iruka fought the instinct to run over and give him a hug, and to _fix fix fix_ when he didn’t even know what needed to be fixed.

The door closed behind Madara, and Hashirama slumped in on himself. He appeared lost in thought as Iruka tiptoed through the kitchen and slunk into the garden. His bare feet met the wooden back porch and the sun glistened down on him. Iruka loved this feeling. He closed his eyes against the brightness, as his vision went a little red from looking against the back of his eyelids while the sun desperately wanted in.

He felt Tenzou, before he heard him.

“I don’t think I should be here.” In the first days, his voice had never reached more than a whisper, but slowly it grew more stable. Iruka opened his eyes, inhaling the fresh smell of moss and spring water that accompanied Tenzou wherever he went. In his arms, he carried four zucchinis, three green and one yellow. He clutched them close to his chest.

“No,” Iruka shot back. “This is your home!”

Tenzou winced at his volume, but didn’t run away.

“You are not leaving. If you leave, I’ll come with you.” Iruka put on his best glowering expression by imitating Madara when Hashirama forgot the laundry in the washing machine.

Tenzou gave a little gasp in response and almost dropped a zucchini. “But I don’t want you to leave your uncles.”

Iruka stemmed his fists into his hips. He knew that he looked very fierce when doing that. For an added effect, he blew the bangs out of his face, meaning business. “Well, lucky you, uncles can be shared. I always wanted to have a brother.”

“Iruka…”

Not waiting for more of Tenzou’s denial, Iruka grabbed two of the vegetables, and took Tenzou’s free hand, marching them into the kitchen where Hashirama was setting the oven, back to all smiles.

“We’re starving!” he loudly declared.

“Look at those zucchinis!” Hashirama cooed. “I knew you’d pick just the right ones, Tenzou. Seems you have an eye for gardening.”

As they all settled at the dinner table, Madara having returned soon after Iruka and Tenzou, they delighted in a colourful array of roasted vegetables: maple-syrup glazed carrots joined bite-sized pieces of rosemary sweet potatoes, mixed with slices of turnip and homegrown zucchinis. Iruka not so sneakily picked out all the carrot pieces, while Hashirama didn’t try to hide how he went for all the zucchini bites. In the end, their plates were wiped empty, and their glasses soon too, after downing a full bottle of homemade compote; Hashirama’s stew of last year’s sweet cherries staining Iruka’s lips a sugary red.

As they were basking in the afterglow of Hashirama’s food, Iruka remembered that there was something he had wanted to tell his uncles. He perked up in his chair and cleared his throat.

“There is something I need to tell you.”

Madara’s only reaction was to lift a single brow whereas Hashirama had to refrain from reaching out for Iruka immediately.

And with all of his nine-year old might Iruka gave a curt nod, first at Hashirama, and then at Madara. “I have decided to adopt Tenzou as my brother.”

Tenzou gave a noise of distress and shrunk into his seat, and that was the opposite of what Iruka had wanted – Hashirama’s mouth opened, though, and closed again, looking back and forth between the two boys as Iruka put on his most serious face. For a moment, a thought crossed his mind that a moustache like his dad's would have made him look even more serious. Alas, he hadn't reached beard-age yet.

No one noticed how Madara turned sideways, coughing into his fist to cover a snort.

“That’s – Iruka, honey, I don’t think that’s for you to decide,” Hashirama started helplessly, and Iruka grabbed Tenzou’s hand and squeezed it. “He’s staying!” he yelled.

Hashirama blinked, and elbowed his husband. “Of course – Iruka, of course he is staying, if he – that is, Tenzou, do you _want_ to stay with us?”

Madara turned back towards the dinner table and cleared his throat. “You’re staying,” he cut in.

“Madara,” Hashirama warned.

Iruka grimaced at Hashirama.

“I want – I want to stay but I shouldn’t,” Tenzou finally spoke. His voice was barely above a whisper and he had tugged his legs onto the seat, hugging his knees into his chest. “Because I don’t want to be a burden, and I don’t want to cause any trouble.”

Iruka huffed at the word ‘burden’. It was one of the words he had heard a lot when his mom was sick in the hospital and came to dislike.

The silence that ensued in the kitchen made Iruka’s fingers itch and twitch. He wanted to say something, to shout at his uncles, but he was scared of frightening Tenzou even more when he just wanted him to stay. He watched Madara’s fingers inch towards Hashirama’s palms he had splayed on the table in agitation, and as Madara squeezed Hashirama’s hand, Hashirama glanced at him mouth still open, and Madara nodded.

Apparently, that was all Hashirama needed before he was up and in front of Tenzou, crouching down. “Tenzou, you are not a burden to us. You are not a burden. We would be so happy to have you stay here, with us. You heard Iruka, he always wanted a brother.”

Tenzou’s head rose barely, just enough for him to take a peek at Hashirama’s friendly expression. “But I – “

“Tenzou,” Hashirama cut in and smiled. “Close your eyes and try to think about nothing else but this question: Do you want to stay with us?”

Iruka held his breath as Tenzou closed his eyes, the brown of his irises disappearing behind his eyelids.

And Tenzou nodded.

Hashirama’s eyes started to tear up but he swallowed and spoke against the lump in his throat, still smiling with the brightness of a dozen of sunflowers. “You stay with us, then. Madara and I will take care of all the rest. You don’t have to worry about anything else. We’ll keep you safe.”

~*~*~

As with matters such as these, they were easier said than done. But Madara and Hashirama were both good at handling that what wasn’t easy, and had learned to talk through what was uncomfortable. They were young, young to be parents, too young some might argue. Not everyone in Leafwood approved of the household at the outskirts of the town, but the number was small because they knew. Knew that Madara protected them against what had taken hold of the woods years and years ago. And they appreciated. Appreciated Hashirama for his aid in sickness and health, for teas and brews that helped ease the pain of heartburn up to the pain of heartbreak.

Where Hashirama was passionate, Madara was loyal. And although neither of them had seen their lives play out like this, they’d both die for their kids.

The house that Hashirama had bought from his small but comfortable inheritance, and eventually dragged Madara to live with him into, had an attic, four rooms on the upper level, and a kitchen and living room on the ground level. The real treasure of it, though, was the garden that had never seen as much care and love before Hashirama had attended to it. And as the garden grew, some of Hashirama’s wounds gradually began to close.

And Tenzou became part of his family.

~*~*~

Iruka turned ten and didn’t think about the curse. Until one night, a nightmare woke him up.

His body was burning, his clothes drenched in sweat. As he crossed the floor, his face glistened in the darkness from the tears he’d shed in his sleep. Iruka didn’t wipe them away. They left salty tracks upon drying.

Outside, the moon was shining. He made a straight line for the greenhouse. Iruka knew this garden well, and could find his way around it with a blindfold tied around his head. He closed his eyes and tried: the invisible weight that grounded him to this earth, the spark in the pit of his stomach, his root, shifted and pulled him forward.

Behind the greenhouse, he started to dig a hole in the ground.

Next to him, Iruka had settled his Box of Things and opened it with muddy fingers. Once, it had held a new pair of shoes, one that Iruka had already grown out of, but now it was filled up to the brim with pieces that an onlooker deemed random and pointless, but were dangerous and alarming to the practiced witch.

Iruka fished for the box of matches he’d stolen from the kitchen drawer where everything but kitchen utensils were stored. He had practiced carefully, over a bucket of water, how to strike them too. The moon disappeared behind a cloud as the match went up in a flame.

Iruka did not have a gift for fire. He could not procure it like his uncle, though he could keep a fire alight for longer than it should burn, in places where it shouldn’t burn. Much of what he could do seemed to work in that direction; Things Shouldn’t But They Did.

“What are you doing?” Tenzou asked.

“I had a nightmare,” Iruka replied, unbothered by Tenzou’s appearance. Tenzou and Iruka had become attached to the hip, so it wasn’t a surprise to Iruka that Tenzou had heard him waking, and followed him outside.

Tenzou’s eyes watched him uneasily.

“Do you want to sleep in my bed?”

No, Iruka thought. Maybe later. Later, when this was done.

A nightmare woke him up. Iruka had dreamed, and Iruka had been aware he was dreaming, but he also knew that dreams and the real world were intertwined, and that dreams could become true if they only wanted to.

“I dreamed that I woke up in my room, but it was empty. There was nothing in it. And when I looked for you and Hashirama and Madara, you weren’t there.”

Tenzou settled down in the dirt. Not close enough to touch, but his warmth seeped into Iruka’s cooling skin.

“Did you find us?” Tenzou’s voice was a hush, as if, like the moon, he was too trying to hide from Iruka.

“Yes,” Iruka nodded and let the match drop into the small hole he had dug. It lit up with fire. “In the forest. You were dead. And it was my fault. That’s why I have to fix this.”

Tenzou shuddered next to him. Not because of his words, but because the wind had picked up. The trees at their backs were shuffling together, clutching at each other for support in the face of what they were witnessing and therefore, the wind was left to roam freely through the gaps they provided.

Iruka rummaged through his box. He was thinking, thinking hard about how he would do this. He didn’t know how to break a curse, and he was too young to cast a spell that would change him irredeemably, make him so unlikeable that no one would come near him ever again. As Iruka shifted the shoe box, something rolled around in it, stopping when it hit the side of the carton. And suddenly, Iruka knew.

He picked out two marbles. Two red ones. He thought about Madara and his eyes, and shook his head. Put one red marble back, and searched for another. He grasped one that was a light blue, almost grey.

“The person I fall in love with has to have eyes with these colours,” he spoke, loud and clear, and let the marbles drop into the fire.

Tenzou touched his arm.

But Iruka only glanced back at the box. What else, what else was there to wish for? A tuft of fur, a shaggy blonde, felted and slightly muddy. “And they have to have…” Iruka actually looked up towards the sky, starting to count stars, going up to seven before he realised that he could continue to count stars till the sun would rise. Seven had to be good enough.

“They have to have seven dogs.” Iruka paused. “Not eight, not six. And the dogs will be able to speak with them.”

Tenzou watched Iruka with growing unease. The fur vanished in the flames.

Next, he grabbed a feather. It shimmered silver in the night, but it could have been either white or grey. It was hard to tell.

“Their hair will be white and grey and silver.” The feather was released. “And their handwriting will be so bad that no one will be able to read it,” Iruka added after he put his eyes to a piece of paper where Hashirama had allowed Iruka to use some of his brushes to try his hand at calligraphy. He rather liked the result, even though it featured a lot of twirls and squiggles.

“Iruka, what are you doing? You will never find anyone like this!” Tenzou hissed. His agitation was showing, and the living green around him noticed. They liked Tenzou very much, and curled around him, to protect, to soothe.

That’s the point, Iruka thought. Finally: “And they’ll be lonely. Everyone will think they are beautiful, that they look like an heir to a fairy tale throne, but they’re very hurt and very lonely, and they think they don’t deserve love.”

Iruka reached for the bottom of the pit. Behind him, Tenzou sucked in a sharp breath. Vines had settled across his knees and arms in an impossible pattern, and held him back. They didn’t want the boy to get hurt. But the flames weren’t hurting Iruka either. He couldn’t even feel the heat.

He searched. Soon, Iruka closed a fist around an object, not sharp but edged and chiselled. A surface smooth as water. Iruka retracted his hand and found a gem in his palm, the size and length of his little finger, sky blue in colour. It looked almost like it could be a pendant for a necklace, pretty but also easy to miss if no one were looking for it.

The fire flickered and died down as Iruka carefully placed the gem in the box. He had done it. No one would ever be hurt again because of the curse, because of him.

“We can go to sleep now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for making it this far. kudos, comments, i appreciate all of it! the second chapter is almost done and all i can say is that Tenzou and Iruka get their hands, well.... dirty :-)


	2. Part II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> back with Part II! chapter count has gone up while i figure out how long this will be. enjoy <3

_Fifteen years later._ **_  
_ **

“Mrs Jennings thinks her cat is possessed and I don’t have the heart to tell her that her cat’s probably just an asshole,” Iruka said. His phone was wedged between his shoulder and ear as he put on his worn-out Docs. Loved as they were, they were also ancient, and if it rained Iruka might as well have been walking with just his socks on, that’s how drenched they got. The right shoe also showed off a rather impressive bitemark from the time a hellhound had gone astray and Iruka and Madara spent an entire night shepherding him out of the town.

“Are you sure the cat’s not possessed?” Tenzou’s asked from the other end of the line. His tone sounded dry, and Iruka could just imagine the small grin on his brother’s face. Behind his voice, there were the sounds that you’d never hear in Leafwood – traffic, ambulance sirens, and humans and creatures elbowing their way through as they would rather sell their soul (if they still had one) than make room for other people on the sidewalk.

Iruka gave a noncommittal hum and put Tenzou on speakerphone. He placed it on the ground as he went to lace up his shoes. “Pretty sure. Mrs Jennings was complaining how she just moved into her daughter’s house, and cats don’t like change, you know. Also, I did a quick google search on demon possessions and all it gave me were New Age articles on how to defeat your inner demon with aromatherapy which, to be expected, but also not helpful. By the way, you’re still coming tomorrow?”

Tenzou laughed and the bustle of the street gave way to a jazzy piano background. Getting his daily caffeine fix, huh. Even though Iruka wasn’t a big coffee drinker he did enjoy a cup of it in the morning; however, out of the two of them he was also the one to get jittery so embarrassingly quickly while Tenzou could down five mugs and be fine. Iruka blamed it on the woodland genes. Something about plant DNA and photosynthesising.

“Yes, I’m almost done up here. Just have to find a gas station and then I’m up for another beautiful six-hour car ride.”

Iruka sighed dramatically. “What a poor child. Remind me, who was it that wanted to move upstate for his postgrad degree? I don’t remember.” He patted the pocket of his high-waisted jeans, the colour of still water, and nodded when his keys jingled.

“Yeah, alright, I get it. Did the uncles land safely?”

It was a thing he sometimes did. Refer to their uncles as The Uncles. As if he had to address that they weren’t biologically related. Iruka couldn’t stop the frown, but it also made Hashirama and Madara sound quite badass.

“No, I think they’re still up in the air. The last text I got was from Hashirama saying that he managed to wrestle Madara onto the plane.”

“I feel bad for laughing, but I still cannot get over Madara being scared of flying out of all things,” Tenzou said around what sounded suspiciously like a sip of coffee.

“I’m with you.” Iruka closed the door behind him and hopped off the veranda stairs. “I think it’s more about the plane than the flying itself, though. Like the technicality of it. Sitting in a giant metal box that’s not supposed to fly, according to him.”

Tenzou ordered a bagel, paid for it, and left the shop, then fell quiet while Iruka started walking. As the silence stretched longer between them, Iruka grew a little suspicious. “Tenzou? You there?”

It took his brother a few seconds before he answered.

“What – yeah, hold up a moment.” The distinct sounds of Tenzou’s phone being pocketed.

Iruka waved at his neighbour from where he was picking up his newspapers dressed in a chequered nightgown, and Iruka averted his eyes when Mr Winchester proved to be not wearing anything under his gown. Again.

Iruka had made it almost half-way to the house of Mrs Jennings’ daughter and her asshole-cat, when there was a rustle on Tenzou’s side.

“Okay, I’m back. I thought there was someone following me but I was wrong.”

Iruka’s heart did a somersault. “ _Following_?”

Tenzou gulped another mouthful of his beloved hot bean water. “Following turned Not-Following. I’m probably just tired. I’ll text you when I’m about to start driving, alright?”

When they hung up, Iruka took a deep breath to soothe the queasiness in his chest. Of course, it wasn’t healthy to worry about his family this much, but this was Tenzou. Tenzou who had appeared in the forest out of nowhere, Tenzou with the slash across his throat, his brother Tenzou, Tenzou who had been so shy and scared of them in the beginning that Iruka couldn’t quite believe what a sarcastic shit he had become now. Tenzou whom Iruka had found scrubbing at his skin for what must have been hours so that it was red and bleeding, because he couldn’t get the smell of fae off him.

Yes, Iruka knew it wasn’t healthy to worry this much. But he was also twenty-five with the evidence of a spell he’d conjured at the age of ten hanging around his neck on a string of cord, with the sole purpose to keep Iruka from killing anyone by falling in love with them. So, he figured, his life wasn’t really measured by a normal standard anyway, and he was allowed to worry a little more than was ‘okay’.

Iruka pressed the doorbell next to the name tag ‘Jennings’ and gave a heavy sigh when he heard the familiar screaming and hissing of a cat who definitely was not possessed, but pissed off that his human had moved the couch one centimetre to the side.

At least Mrs Jennings hadn’t called about fleas.

~*~*~

Iruka was lying on the porch swing, soaking in the last rays of sunshine that made him sweat but his skin glow, made his hair appear more red than the auburn colour it actually was, when the message from Hashirama arrived.

_“Just landed!!!! Madara had a panic attack and slept through most of the flight after we got him to calm down and we’re on the way to the cottage right now. French people are so charming LOL!! *sparkle heart emoji*”_

Iruka read the text twice and had to put his phone down for a second. He still didn’t think that Hashirama knew what LOL meant, or if he did, he still didn’t get how to actually employ it. Or maybe it was Iruka’s millennial humour that couldn’t cope with non-ironic uses of early internet slang.

He typed out a quick reply to signal that he was glad both of his uncles had made it safely to their honeymoon destination that was, what, only a little over twenty years belated? Anyway, he couldn’t wait for the stories when Hashirama and Madara made it back. If he remembered right, they even booked a wine tasting. A _wine tasting._ While Hashirama drank just about anything, Madara had _opinions_. And while Madara’s French was impeccable, Hashirama made his way through any foreign country thanks to his warm and charming personality. People loved Hashirama, and Iruka wondered whether his uncle would blow up his Instagram with daily pictures of sunsets and embarrassingly sweet snaps of him and his husband.

As Iruka let his eyes roam over the garden Hashirama had spent a lifetime cultivating, he remembered what he had intended to do this evening. No more procrastinating. Hashirama would kill him if he let the rhubarb grow wild and become too bitter for harvest. Iruka gave a quick thanks to his past self for tucking his hair into a tight braid and grabbed a knife with a wooden handle from the garden shed to cut the stalks.

Usually, his hair would get into his face while gardening when his hands were already muddied and Iruka would quietly cuss and brood but also refuse to take a break to wash his hands and put his hair in another updo, retorting to using elbows and arms to keep it away from his eyes.

Carefully, he made his way through the thicket of Hashirama’s rhubarb patch which, really, resembled a jungle more than a patch. With the blade in one hand, and the other around a strong stem, Iruka set to work.

After cutting about half of the patch down, Iruka allowed himself to catch his breath and wiped away the sweat running down his temples with his cropped shirt. The sun was setting now but the heat of early June still burnt its way through his clothes. Quickly, Iruka got rid of his tee and carried his pickings to the porch where he cut the leaves from the stems, and laid the leaves back onto the grass to dry. Later he would cut the leaves into smaller pieces to put them onto the compost.

As he was separating the last stem from its leaf, Iruka hesitated for a second and held the stalk above his head, like an umbrella. He glanced upwards at the sun that was now shaded from him. The light illuminated the veins that kept the plant alive, and Iruka got lost staring until his eyes had adjusted to the shade and he had to blink several times when he finally brought the leaf down.

Sitting on the porch with a huge bowl between his legs, he cut the stalks into small pieces. Considering the amount of rhubarb he’d harvested, Iruka would be cooking well past midnight if he didn’t get a little help through a charm or two. In the background, Bill Withers was singing about his lovely day from where Iruka had connected his phone to the kitchen speakers.

Iruka had gotten one or two speeches from Tenzou about going out into the world, really seeing it, in the past. But what Tenzou didn’t understand was that Iruka _had_ seen the world, that he had travelled and always felt compelled back to Leafwood out of a love for this curious, and strange little town where it rained on every Tuesday and also 17th day of a month. He had seen his fair share of what it meant to be alive, and thought it didn’t make much of a difference whether he experienced his share of earthly pain in the town where he felt at home, or in a city far away. Or, no, it did make a difference. It felt easier here.

He rummaged around the kitchen as Bill Withers gave way to Joni Mitchell, and filled a huge pot with as much of the rhubarb pieces as it allowed. Iruka set it to heat while helping himself to a portion of homemade sweet potato gnocchi from the fridge, and prepared a simple basil pesto while the gnocchi were reheating.

With a plate of steaming food, Iruka hopped onto the kitchen counter and let his feet dangle, stuffing his mouth and watching the rhubarb come to a simmer.

A flutter of wings caught his attention and Iruka glanced away from his gnocchi to not one, not two, but three ravens shifting where they were standing on the veranda. “Madara’s not here,” Iruka talked around the fork in his mouth. “If it’s important you can leave it with me, but I probably won’t be able to help you.”

The ravens seemed to consider this, looking at each other, before they took off. A single feather as dark as coal fluttered down onto the porch and Iruka rolled his eyes. At least they hadn’t come into the kitchen and left their inquiry on the kitchen table with bird poop.

After finishing his meal, Iruka bent to pick up the feather and carry it upstairs to the Attic. It became the Attic with a capital A once Hashirama had almost set it on fire while experimenting and now only objects of low to mid-range danger were allowed up there. Before he left the kitchen, though, Iruka tapped against the steaming pot on the stove. “Slow and steady till the morning, alright?” The pot didn’t give a response, but Iruka knew it had heard him either way.

Yes, Iruka thought as his head hit the pillow on his bed.

Things felt easier here.

~*~*~

A steady hum droned its way through Iruka’s dreams, rousing him from his sleep. It took him a moment to realise the noise was coming from his phone as he usually had it on mute, except he was taking emergency calls now. Blearily, Iruka patted the space next to him, coming across his old and worn-out seal plushie. It was a wonder the thing was still holding together, but then Iruka had stitched it up approximately five times by now.

The noise stopped. And picked right up again.

Iruka’s face was still shoved into his pillow and he grumbled into it.

When his hand finally made contact with his phone, which was more of a device straight from hell right now, Iruka blinked at the caller ID for barely half a second before picking up. “I swear, I don’t know what time zone you’re running on, but here it is very much ‘Iruka needs to be fast asleep’ time.”

Tenzou panted on the other end of the line. “You done?”

Iruka considered this. Seriously, he could go for a rant. Iruka could _always_ go for a rant. He had been sleeping so well too. “Yes. Have you been running?”

“I need your help.”

Iruka sat up. “Where are you?”

Tenzou didn’t hesitate. “Almost home. Fifteen minutes. Can you get two pairs of work gloves from the shed?”

Iruka did want to ask. But instead he agreed, and went to look for an old pair of pants that he wouldn’t miss too terribly in case they got ruined.

~*~*~

Iruka stared at the body lying in the trunk of Tenzou’s old Ford.

“And you’re sure he’s dead?”

Tenzou turned to look at him with an incredulous expression. “Well, I fucking hope so.”

Iruka backed half a step away. He was sure Tenzou was in shock. Iruka was sure he himself was in shock. “Okay, I was just _asking._ ”

Tenzou snapped his gloves on. “Stop asking then,” he hissed.

“Wait, wait.” Iruka stared at the clean cut across the dead man’s throat, looking as if it had been sliced right through. “What are we doing with, uh, his body?”

Iruka took in the ruffled sight of Tenzou. His face was flushed and there was sweat drying on his temples, on his back. A short glimpse at his hands before Tenzou had put on gloves revealed bleeding knuckles. Scratches covered his upper arms.

Tenzou sighed and some of the tension around his jaw waned. “I think our best choice would be burning him. Separate the body into smaller parts. But – “

Oh, hell no. Iruka scrunched up his nose. “Unless you want to crawl up the smokestack and wipe up all the remnants of this," he gestured at the trunk, "in soot-form, I am voting against that idea.”

“I swear to – okay, Iruka, if you won’t let me talk, let me ask you this. How are you not freaking out?”

“The only reason I am not freaking out is because you are standing next to me, alive,” Iruka replied honestly. “And I told you I’d help you bury a body if need be. You’re my brother.”

Before Tenzou could reply, a rustle in the undergrowth next to the driveway startled them. “Fuck,” Tenzou cursed. He cursed again. Iruka didn’t say anything and remained quiet when Tenzou took a step back from his car, and put his arms behind his head.

Once again, the moon was watching the two boys. But unlike the first time, the one who she’d called Quiet was in clear distress, while it was the other’s turn to remain calm. She decided against hiding behind the clouds, too intrigued as to what was going to happen next.

It took Tenzou a while before he spoke, and when he finally did, determination had turned his eyes hard. “If you make coffee, I’ll tell you what happened. But first we need to get rid of this, alright?”

Iruka wanted to protest at the thought of caffeine after midnight, but nodded instead. He fumbled for something in the pocket of his jean jacket that would keep the words they’d speak to each other between them and away from someone else’s ears, and as his hand closed around the shell of a walnut, he knew two things with certainty:

  * There was nothing inside the shell of the walnut: it was empty, although it had never been cracked.
  * After tonight, it wouldn’t be empty anymore and Iruka’s and Tenzou’s secret would find a home in it.



Together, they hefted the body out of the trunk and carried it into the garden. Together, they dug a hole big enough for a body into the soil where earlier Iruka had harvested the rhubarb that was still cooking in the kitchen. Together, they set it into the ground.

Trying not to be too obvious about it, Iruka took a closer look at the man’s face. It wasn’t exactly distinguishable, pale, with straight white hair reaching down to his chin. Up close, the cut across his throat seemed to be less of a cut and more of a… Iruka tilted his head to his side as he rested his weight against his shovel. As if something had wrapped around his throat and just, well, pinched his head off his neck. Except that his head was back on his body now. Glued together. Maybe. He’d ask Tenzou for details over coffee.

It took them another hour to shovel the hole back up and straighten the rhubarb bed. By the end, they were both exhausted and in desperate need of showers. But the task wasn’t done yet, not until Iruka made sure that the patch was sanctified. He left Tenzou in the garden to fetch some dried rosemary and a pack of monkshood seeds, and sprinkled the mixture over the grave. He guessed it was a grave. A temporary one.

He dragged the hose from where it lay sleepily curled up like a snake to the patch and watered the grave. Lo and behold, the monkshood seeds perked up, greedy for water, greedy for this life. With some dismay for Iruka wasn’t too fond of aconite, knowing how much damage it could do, he watched the seeds stir, and split, and germinate. At least this would keep any curious noses away.

As a last step, Iruka took the walnut and pushed it into the soil.

With the hose, Tenzou and Iruka washed their hands thoroughly, getting rid of any dirt under their fingernails that had lodged there even though they’d worn gloves, knowing that bringing dirt from a graveyard into the house brought bad luck. They stood next to each other in silence, Tenzou half a head taller than Iruka. Iruka remembered how offended he had been when a late growth spurt had put Tenzou ahead of him and he huffed at memory.

“What?” Tenzou asked.

“Just thinking about things,” Iruka answered. The soap was lavender scented, and he wrinkled his nose. He did not like cleaning products to smell like lavender. Iruka was a bit peculiar about it.

Tenzou watched him out of the corner of his eyes, and thought Things as well. Mainly, he thought, that he shouldn’t pull his brother into shit that was bigger than them both. That, maybe, if Hashirama and Madara were here he could let them handle it, but he chased that thought away as quick as it came. Hashirama and Madara owed Tenzou nothing. Just because he was scared, he wouldn’t excuse getting his family in danger.

Iruka stared back and thought that Tenzou was probably thinking stupid thoughts.

As the espresso was brewing on the stovetop in Hashirama’s little macchinetta that he loved so dearly he usually only let people use it when he wasn’t at home and didn’t have to resort to biting his nails so he could fight the urge to take it out of anyone’s hands, Tenzou pulled two mugs from the cupboard.

“Is the oat milk fresh?”

Iruka turned around from where he was bracing himself on the countertop to find Tenzou sticking his head into the fridge. “Yeah, I made it this morning. Can we talk about the dead body in our garden now?”

“It’s not our garden. You have an apartment downtown,” Tenzou remarked and Iruka?

Iruka snapped.

“You’re being a fucking prick right now.”

In the background, steam began to rise from the macchinetta. Iruka didn’t hear it.

“It is _my_ garden. And it is also _yours_. I know you’re clearly in shock now and I don’t necessarily want to kick your ass, but, and so help me any kind of God or higher power, I will if you don’t stop with this bullshit.”

The fridge closed with just the hint of a sound.

“You’re right. Sorry.”

Iruka nodded. “And now please sit down and talk to me because I am seriously worried.”

~*~*~

What Tenzou hadn’t told Iruka before was that he had the feeling he was being followed for weeks. For weeks it had been the glimmer of translucent, dust-coloured eyes at the local store Tenzou always got his groceries at. For weeks, the rot and decay of the darkest part of the forest in Tenzou’s and Iruka’s childhood backyard kept catching his nose as he was browsing the library for his research on myth and mysticism in contemporary architecture. For weeks, he kept dreaming of his teeth falling out, of spitting out teeth, of the sink in his little city flat he shared with a flatmate he probably saw less than he saw the full moon filling up with brown and black teeth when he opened the faucet.

But he told Iruka now, and Iruka tried to staunch his anger like a knife cut to his finger: it just kept bleeding.

Nothing else had happened, though, not until tonight. Not until Tenzou had gotten to his car in the empty parking lot of the university building in the half-dark, not until he had gotten into the driver’s seat, and not until he had gone off the highway and hit the ordinary roads that wound through the densely forested countryside. When it happened, though, Tenzou just about managed to swerve his car away from the opposite lane and into a shallow ditch, thankfully no guardrails when the tar gave way to soil and mud, as a hand clawed around his throat and a hand obscured his view and a hand ripped at his hair and –

The driver’s door swung open as someone, or some _thing,_ dragged Tenzou out of the car and through the earth.

Tenzou’s upper lip split apart as it was dragged across a stone, and he struggled against the grip on his body, he wreathed and writhed, and he tried to wrest himself away from whatever was pulling at him. But as he went to ask his surroundings for help for they _were_ in a forest, they were in _his_ , Tenzou found his tongue tied and his limbs like deadweight, unresponsive.

(It wasn’t his forest. It wasn’t Iruka’s either. They didn’t own it. Madara had owned it once, or rather his family had. There was a reason Madara felt tied to this land, and why he kept an eye on the woods at all times. Because more of it was being claimed with the years and Madara wasn’t having it.)

The hiss of a serpent: “What a shame.”

It was a deep voice and the dialect was familiar; familiar and unsettling – as if you entered a room and found yourself knowing it like the back of your hand although you had never been in the room before.

“They said I need to bring you back alive. That they need you, you and your gift. But look at you.”

Pain exploded in Tenzou’s head as a well-aimed kick against his chest made him roll over to his back and exposed him to the sight of the man above him.

“I’m thinking I should just kill you instead. Take that gift of yours,” he spat, “and leave your body here to rot and let this land reclaim you. And no one needs to know.”

“Who the fuck – “ Tenzou spoke against his gritted teeth but his breath was taken from him when the claws that had wound around his throat earlier found a home under his ribcage.

“Just need your heart fort that,” the man whispered as he was pressing his other clawed hand against Tenzou’s forehead to keep him from moving. “Oh, I know what you’re thinking.” He turned gaze from where he was concentrating on turning Tenzou’s intestines over to Tenzou’s face, and took in the blood spilling out of his mouth. “’Can someone as noble as me, living in a town full of humans as if I am one of them, really come from the same place as this repulsive, hideous thing?’ The answer is easy. What do you dream of at night? Do you dream at all?”

 _I dream of killing things like you,_ Tenzou thought but couldn’t for the blood rushing into his mouth in pulses.

The man knit his brows together, pushing his lower lip forward. A pitiful expression on a beast with yellow serpent’s eyes. “Don’t kid yourself, Yamato. We’re made from the same fabric.”

Finally, Tenzou spread his fingers wide. By pronouncing the name that Tenzou had been given by what was his, he guessed, original kin, the man also broke the glamour, the spell. Tenzou couldn’t do much more than watch the vines dash towards the serpent and wrap around his torso, his legs, and arms, around his hip, around his eyes, looking for a way _in in in_. Essentially, though, Tenzou watched one vine climb to his throat and wrap around it and tighten until capillaries on his face began to burst like small fireworks. He collapsed but Tenzou let the flora at him. The man’s body was dragged away from Tenzou, and Tenzou breathed through the pain for what seemed like forever until the wound on his chest began to knit itself together.

Slowly, he sat up and looked down.

He needed to clean himself a little before he’d make it home.

~*~*~

“Do you know his name?” Iruka asked.

“Mizuki, I think. I’m not entirely sure. I didn’t recognise him at first but I’m pretty sure that I have seen him in a few of my classes. Throughout the last years. It seems he’s been trailing me.”

Iruka nodded. His hands were clamped around his mug of tea that had long gone cold, cold sweat on his palms.

“I generally don’t remember much about that time,” Tenzou spoke around his third cup of coffee. Iruka scanned his brother’s skin for any tells of blood. “I mean, we always knew. Hashirama and Madara, me and you, that I wasn’t entirely human, that I was part fae, part forest. But I wasn’t enough to keep, apparently.”

“Thank you. For telling me.” It was all Iruka could say without crying. But then, because Iruka was Iruka, and Iruka would follow his brother to the end of the world, he added “I’m glad that fucker’s dead” in a hoarse voice and promptly burst into tears.

~*~*~

During the next week Iruka and Tenzou did the responsible thing and kept talking about what had happened. Much to Iruka’s dismay, though, Tenzou practically begged him not to tell Hashirama and Madara until they came back.

“They deserve a honeymoon!” Tenzou shouted from the shower.

“YOU ALMOST DIED!” Iruka yelled from the living room downstairs.

Okay, maybe it was a bit more fighting that actually talking, but nevertheless they communicated. And in some sense Iruka understood Tenzou’s reasoning behind not wanting to tell their uncles yet, reasoning that went beyond not wanting to disturb them during their downtime. Because from what Iruka knew about Hashirama and Madara, and he thought he knew them pretty well, Hashirama would have a full-blown breakdown and only get a hold of himself to serve as Madara’s impulse control. Because Madara’s default state was ‘one second away from waging a war on the wrongful forest folk’ and it took a lot of calming exercises and meditation to get him to calm down. Looking at it from where he was munching on his granola, Iruka thought he was probably a more well-balanced person than his uncles, despite losing both his parents as a child and having his entire family cursed by his great-great-great-great-great-grandmother.

But life went on, and Tenzou started working on his thesis at home, and Iruka gave his apartment in the centre of town a thorough spring cleaning in the middle of June. And they had coffee and tea every morning while checking Hashirama’s Instagram that was usually just an account dedicated to the garden and its various harvests. It didn’t unnerve Iruka that the purple of the monkshood growing in the garden was always there to catch him off-guard because it also meant that the body under them would stay where it was until their uncles were back and they could figure out what exactly to do with it.

Tenzou was out when Iruka dropped a spoon in the kitchen where he had been preparing dough for focaccia, and he squinted at the silverware on the ground. Someone was going to pay them a visit today.

So Iruka went about his day like he would on any other day and checked on the tomatoes in the greenhouse, removed a few slugs from inside the growing cabbage heads and softly told them off for coming back when there were places much better to stay for them, and he started on his class reading for anthropologic pedagogy.

He was sitting cross-legged on the veranda in a simple white shirt and denim overalls, the fabric rolled up at his ankles because he’d gotten them second-hand from someone who’d been taller than him, when Iruka heard the tell-tale fizzle of garden hose about to burst.

“Oh, fuck.”

He sprang into action just as the hose jumped away from where Iruka had left it to fill the old wooden barrels for better access when Hashirama wanted to use a watering can. Iruka ran across the grass and ducked as the pipe launched itself at him, managing not to get slapped across the face but still getting drenched in the process. He sank to his knees before the little shed that hid the premise’s water point, scrambling into the tight space, and with dripping hands he screwed up the spigot.

For a minute Iruka just knelt on the ground and caught his breath. His fingers were ice-cold as he wiped the hair from his forehead. The braid down his back had come loose in parts, and Iruka didn’t even bother to see whether it looked like he’d peed himself. It was most likely a yes.

When he sat up, though, Iruka hit his head against the roof of the little shed. Hit it _hard_.

“Shit,” Iruka cursed and squeezed his eyes shut as if that would help alleviate the pain; maybe it did help by blocking out light as a trigger, or it was the body’s normal response to pain or – Gods, that _hurt_. Iruka was pretty sure his brain had been jumbled up. His name was Iruka Umino and he was twenty-five years old and his birthday was on the 26th of May… that sounded about right, he guessed? Maybe he’d gotten lucky and his brain was okay.

More carefully now Iruka crawled backwards and got back up on his two feet. He made it halfway across the lawn before he very spontaneously and kind of urgently decided to lay back down in the half-shade and close his eyes for a while. Just to rest. Not because his head was still hurting, and he was getting a bit nauseous from the world starting to spin at its edges.

He registered the foreign steps that made their way over to him. For a second, he bristled like a cat trying to make itself seem as tall as possible, but the more serene part of Iruka quietly let him know that there was no malicious intent waving off the person. So, Iruka figured, this was as good an information as he could get right now, and exhaled the breath he’d been holding. A low hum, almost like a bee’s buzzing, filled Iruka’s ears, and he knew it wasn’t coming from the garden, and neither was it coming from himself.

“Are you alright?”

“Yes,” Iruka answered the voice. His eyes were still closed, and he sought out that buzz, so close that he felt like he could touch it now.

“Are you sure? Should I call for any help?”

Iruka grimaced at that and wondered how he could make them go away so there weren’t any distractions as he sought out the spark in the air. He opened his eyes. Above him, the face of the most handsome man Iruka had ever seen hovered, his eyebrows drawn up in an expression of worry.

Iruka’s mouth fell open. The buzzing was coming from _him._

A pause. Iruka kept staring. The stranger had a scar running down one side of his face, through and over his eyelid that he kept closed. Immediately, Iruka wanted to know how it had gotten there and fight whoever was responsible for it.

“I just hit my head and got very drenched,” he supplied.

The worry didn’t fade from his face, but a small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. A very pretty mouth, Iruka noted, with lips on the thinner side, and a beauty mark decorating the space under it. “You want to go into the house and lie down?”

Iruka thought about this. Because the stranger was a stranger still.

As if he’d read Iruka’s thoughts, the man opened his mouth: “I’m – “

“Very attractive,” Iruka said.

He looked surprised, and then very amused. “You are very attractive?”

“No. I’m Iruka,” Iruka corrected him and then slowly, oh so slowly, his own words registered through the cotton candy fuzz that was in his head. But he couldn’t stop himself, despite the warmth flooding his cheeks. “You’re very attractive. And I might have a concussion.”

“Kakashi. And thank you, Iruka,” Kakashi said with an ease that Iruka admired. He almost blurted out if Kakashi could say his name again because it had sounded _so_ nice when he said it, but the same way that Iruka bit down on that Kakashi also bit down on his laugh that dared to spill over. “Let’s get you up, shall we?”

Iruka nodded and took the hand that Kakashi offered as he helped Iruka sit up first, and then wrapped an arm around his shoulder to keep him supported. A wave of nausea hit Iruka when he’d gone fully vertical again, and with his hand he motioned for Kakashi to wait a second. With slow steps, they made their way over to the veranda, up the steps, through the kitchen, and into the living room.

“The wards on the house didn’t go off so I’ll take it as a sign that you are good person, Kakashi,” Iruka muttered, narrating the house’s mechanics, as Kakashi hoisted his legs onto the sofa and fluffed a cushion for him.

(He fluffed it. _Fluffed_. Iruka might be in not-love.)

“You might want to wait with your final judgement on that.” Kakashi stood next to the sofa and, as if he’d been here for months instead of bare minutes, went over to fireplace and got a blanket from a basket next to it, to drape it over Iruka. “Do you want something for the pain?” Kakashi looked over his shoulder. “A cold towel? I don’t know if you have some turmeric, or willow bark here – “

“Ibuprofen should be fine,” Iruka interrupted. “In the kitchen, the drawer near the toaster.”

A blink of an eye and Kakashi was back with a glass of water and two pills. Iruka took one, swallowed, and left the other for later.

“It seems to me like you’ll be fine, but if you throw up in the next hour or two it might be a bit more serious.”

Iruka nodded. “Okay. I have a question. Why are you buzzing?”

Kakashi tilted his head to one side, looking a little like a puppy. With that mane on his head, the impression was near-perfect. His hair was such a gorgeous colour too – a pastel pink, almost rose but a bit dusty. And from this close Iruka made out the silver piercing he had missed earlier, sitting above his upper lip and right below where a septum piercing would be placed.

“What do you mean?”

Iruka unravelled his hand from under the blanket, the task taking him a bit longer than he would be proud of, but Kakashi waited patiently.

“There’s – there’s a buzz around you. It’s a bit like a spark, but that’s the word we use for ourselves, so it feels a little weird calling you that when I know you’re not a witch.” Kakashi’s single eye widened a little. “But there’s energy being drawn to you, collecting itself. It’s,” Iruka flailed, “like a buzz.” He put an emphasis on those last zz’s.

“I – “ Kakashi started to draw away but that was the opposite of what Iruka wanted. But he had a slight hunch that he might draw him away further if he kept going, so he tried to be as good as gold and kept his lips shut. “It’s been a while since anyone’s been able to sense it.” Kakashi paused and swallowed. And Iruka could understand his hesitation.

But suddenly, Iruka also realised that Kakashi had carried the tell-tale signs of a query into his garden, buried underneath the buzzing. Right, that. Iruka found himself desperately wanting Kakashi not to turn into just another client.

“There’s something you need to know,” Iruka stated more than asked. “I’m afraid I might be closed for business right now. Inquiries of the magical kind will be taken again tomorrow,” he slurred.

There was one thing Iruka’s concussed brain needed to hear Kakashi say, though, before he drifted off to unconsciousness with an almost-stranger in his home.

“You’re not here to kill my family, are you? Because I will haunt you if you do.”

The tension that had crept into his posture left Kakashi’s body at once, and he took a deep breath from where he was kneeling next to the sofa, laughing just a little. “I promise, Iruka.”


	3. Part III

Iruka opened his eyes and stared into his brother’s face.

“Fucking hell!” he yelled and recoiled instinctively into the couch, his heart daring to beat right out of his chest.

Admittedly, Tenzou was sitting on the armchair across the couch, a coffee table between them. He wore his face of extenuated displeasure and took no notice of Iruka’s shock. Or at least he showed no sign of guilt in having scared the living hell out of Iruka. All Tenzou did to acknowledge Iruka’s stirring was to take one slow sip of his black, black coffee.

Iruka put an arm over his face and waited for the pulse burning through his veins to slow down. But as his nervous system calmed down, a roaring headache slunk its way in. He groaned. “Don’t do that shit, Tenzou. I feel like my head’s about to explode.”

There was no answer from Tenzou besides the sound of another sip. Iruka moved his arm up to his forehead and glanced at him.

“So, Iruka,” Tenzou started as if he hadn’t heard him. “Care to talk about the stranger I found in our home?”

Iruka grimaced. “What? What stranger?

Looking at him now, Tenzou seemed as if he’d just gotten back home. A set of car keys were resting in his lap and he wore the pair of glasses that he usually only wore when driving.

“Oh, you know. The man in our garden who’s currently fixing the water pump.”

Iruka gingerly sat up against the backrest although it made his head throb. “What are you talking abo– “

Iruka’s eyes widened.

Tenzou nodded. “There it is.”

At once, the memories of the last evening came back to him in a rush. How he had been working in the garden when the water system decided to cause havoc on him, and how he hadn’t even bothered to fix it because he’d hit his head as soon as he managed to wrench the spigot shut. And how the man – _Kakashi_ , Iruka remembered – had appeared out of nowhere and helped him back into the house and how, fuck, Iruka had made an utter and complete fool out of himself by blurting out that Kakashi was _very attractive_ right then and there.

Iruka closed his eyes and, as his face heated up, wondered whether Tenzou could be persuaded to in turn persuade the ground to swallow him whole and not spit him back up.

“Well, he’s handsome, I’ll give you that,” Tenzou casually said when he realised Iruka was not going to speak soon. “I hope you used protection.”

The words belatedly registered in Iruka’s head and then it took all of his willpower not to kill him right then and there. “Please leave.”

“That’s an ambiguous response, Iruka. As your brother I care about your health.” He heard Tenzou set down his coffee mug. A pause, and then: “Was it good?”

Iruka pinched the bridge of his nose, right above his scar. He could feel the blush on his skin under his fingertips. “I did not sleep with him and I am going to strangle you if you don’t stop speaking now.”

Tenzou hummed and Iruka was about to thank the gods and goddesses when Tenzou piped up again. “Will you, though?”

He knew Tenzou was just being an ass and trying to get a rise out of him, but it was difficult not to respond when Iruka knew that Kakashi was still in their garden. With the goal to get up and slouch into the kitchen where some more painkillers were waiting for him, (and maybe a big cup of milk with a tiny bit of coffee), he scuffled over to Tenzou’s armchair and stopped right before him. Tenzou met his stare with an unimpressed expression and the moment dragged on until Iruka smushed his hand into Tenzou’s face and Tenzou in return went for Iruka’s hair. They jostled for a second or two, and then Iruka let off and made his way over to the kitchen, not before sticking his tongue out at his brother with a very pointed look.

“Very mature of you, ‘Ruka!” Tenzou called over to him.

As Iruka went about foaming the oat milk for two cups of coffee, he realised that Tenzou hadn’t even meant whether he was planning to sleep with Kakashi; that his question had only been a childish counter to Iruka’s threat of strangling him.

Iruka blushed even harder.

~*~*~

Iruka stepped out onto the back porch with two steaming mugs in each of his hands. He had put up his hair in a low knot at the back of his neck, just to get it out of his face, and maybe because he knew the strands that were too short for tying them up framed his face quite nicely.

For a moment, Iruka stood there and let the warm morning light ease the headache behind his temples. While Madara suffered from migraines that got worse with bright light, Iruka always felt his core stretching towards the sun as if all his troubles and sorrows could be eased with but a little sun, maybe a little water, and the sound of summer rain washing over him, too.

When he averted his face from where he had reached it out for the sky to see, their visitor was standing a few metres away, towelling his hands dry from what Tenzou had told him was repairing, and staring right at Iruka. But before Iruka’s head had any chance of swaying into this and that direction of what had happened and what was going to happen, he called out to Kakashi and raised one of the mugs in a toast.

“Coffee?”

Kakashi smiled, and _fucking hell_ , this was just getting worse and worse. Although it was just a tiny upturn of the corners of his mouth that Iruka had a low chance of noticing from where he was standing, he still saw Kakashi’s eye gleaming.

Iruka handed one mug off to Kakashi and sat down on the wooden stairs up to the back porch. Kakashi sat down next to him, not touching but close enough that Iruka caught the few sprinkles of freckles on the backs of Kakashi’s hands. They weren’t nearly as visible as Tenzou’s, but they were there. And they were distractingly cute.

“One of the tubes that connects the water pump to the tap is broken. If you replace it, you should be good to go.”

Iruka nodded his thanks and placed his own mug between his knees, holding it there. It was made from ceramic and was part of a set that Hashirama had, in his words, birthed in a pottery class ages ago, during a small life crisis in which he thought that he’d have to expand his expertise apart from rearing the largest turnips the world had ever seen. The mugs had the colour of a forest underwater with black sprinkles on them, and they were one of Iruka’s favourite thing to look at. But fine arts aside, Iruka had to settle something.

“So,” he started, “how about we pretend that you found me unconscious and carried me into the house and we didn’t talk and I didn’t say anything because, you know, I asked very nicely?”

Kakashi snorted into his coffee and Iruka found even that attractive. Something was wrong with him.

“I’d rather not,” Kakashi answered after wiping the milk foam from his upper lip. Iruka did _not_ stare, and especially did not stare at the piercing moving as Kakashi drank.

Iruka whined a little. “Seriously? Can’t I have a little dignity?”

Kakashi didn’t look at him as he answered. “I found your concussed rambling rather enticing.”

A moment of silence passed as Iruka took in the implication behind _that_ , and was about to say ‘I find _you_ enticing’ when he managed to stop himself at the last second. In the light of the day, the colour of Kakashi’s hair almost matched that of 80’s bubble gum, the vibrancy only half as intense, though. A little sigh escaped Iruka, at which Kakashi eyed him from the side.

“What brought you here, Kakashi?”

Kakashi took his time. In fact, he took so much time in choosing his words, it seemed, that Iruka let his gaze roam over the garden. From this angle he could just about make out the blooming hats of the aconite from where they’d buried the body. It did look kind of odd, and Iruka wondered whether Kakashi had taken notice of the contrasting purple against the rest of the garden but Kakashi stared straight ahead. The buzz he had felt last night was there, but it had subsided.

Kakashi’s next words pulled him from his head. “I need to talk to Tenzou Senju. I’m looking for a man who has last been seen with him.”

Now, Iruka did stare. Well. There was that.

He got up and called out for Tenzou. Despite knowing better, he turned back to Kakashi.

“Would you like to have some breakfast?”

~*~*~

Iruka sat cross-legged on his chair, digging a fork into the pancakes Tenzou had busied himself with.

“No, not that one,” he gestured at Kakashi who was reaching for one of the little bowls on the table. “That’s salt, not sugar. Unless you want salt with your coffee, but you can’t have that salt. It’s for arguments.”

Kakashi had stopped mid-motion and looked at Iruka from under his eyelashes. Or, that’s what Iruka saw because he suddenly noticed how long Kakashi’s eyelashes were.

“Uh,” Kakashi said and his eyes swerved nervously towards Tenzou, who was leaning against the counter with his arms crossed in front of his chest. “I… do kind of need salt.”

Iruka nodded and pulled at a built-in dinner table drawer and rummaged for an unopened saltshaker. He knew some people added salt to their coffee to get rid of some of the acidity thanks to his designated coffee snob of a brother, but as he watched Kakashi dump a spoon of salt into his coffee, it confirmed what he’d been thinking. This was one of those nonhuman things, then.

“What’s salt for arguments?”

“It’s for when you want to argue with salt,” Tenzou deadpanned.

Iruka popped a blueberry into his mouth. “Sorry for that, being awake this early turns him grumpy.”

“It’s a superstition,” Tenzou explained, without any reaction to Iruka’s remark. “When you spill salt, it’s supposed to bring an argument into your home. So there’s always a bowl of salt on the table, if anyone needs a reason to yell.”

Kakashi seemed to ponder this. “You can’t just have an argument without the salt?”

Iruka exchanged a look with Tenzou and laughed a little. “There would be too much yelling in this household otherwise.” He downed his pancakes in maple syrup and took a large bite.

There was a slight and frail smile on Kakashi’s lips, but a smile nonetheless. Watching him, Iruka thought he looked a little tense, as if there was something he needed to get out of his system. But then Kakashi looked between Tenzou and Iruka. “And you’re brothers, then? I figured from the surnames.”

“Adopted, but yes. Hashirama Senju is my uncle. You sure you didn’t come here for him?” Because usually clients either sought out Hashirama or Madara, depending on their query.

Kakashi just shook his head and looked at Tenzou instead. “I’m looking for a man who has used the name Mizuki Touji for at least two centuries now, and the last trace led back to you.”

Tenzou’s eyebrows crept towards his hairline. He looked very unimpressed but Iruka saw the line of his mouth barely tensing. Iruka kept his mouth shut. Whatever Kakashi wanted to know, this was dangerous territory. If someone should speak, it was Tenzou.

“I have come across him, yes.”

Kakashi perked up, such a fast reaction that Iruka startled and missed his mouth with his fork by whole meters. His gaze was drawn to Kakashi’s scar, and the eye that was closely shut.

“I need to know where he is or,” he paused and shifted in his seat, the fabric of his jeans, ripped at the knees Iruka had noticed, rustling, “what happened to him.”

“What is your business with him?”

Kakashi sighed. “I know that he isn’t a good person – “

“I have it on good authority that he might be a psychopath.”

Iruka had to agree with Tenzou on that and Kakashi cringed. “He isn’t a good person. And I need to make sure that he stays away from – “ He faltered again.

Iruka watched him closely and listened to the buzzing that picked up again as Kakashi tried to make his point.

“He needs to stay away. But there’s something I need from him first.”

“No offense, Kakashi, but that sounds very unconvincing.”

Kakashi looked frustrated. “Believe me, I know but I can’t – “ Once again Kakashi remained wordless with his lips slightly parted, staring straight ahead.

Tenzou’s face grew darker with every passing second. “You can’t _what_? Look, I don’t know what’s brought you here. I don’t even know where you got that information from, that I was seen with him. If you have business you need to take care of, and need help or assistance, we might be able to provide you that. But not if you’re keeping shit to yourself.”

Kakashi brought a hand to his face, and rubbed over his scared eye; then moved it to the back of his neck. His gaze was downturned, and Iruka got the impression that he wasn’t struggling with Tenzou’s aggressiveness as much as struggling with expressing himself.

Iruka propped up his chin, still staring at the man at the other end of the table. He couldn’t fault Tenzou for his attitude but intrinsically wished he could open up more – it’s what Iruka was trying as he chased the buzz. If he concentrated enough he saw it as a light blue flittering, wavering mess that kept close to Kakashi’s frame but, and this was the most striking part of it, Kakashi seemed to take no notice of how tightly the energy, or his chakra perhaps, coiled around him. Every time Kakashi had tried to speak, the chakra waned in its intensity as if it was expecting to be released. But it only built up, ebbed and flowed, and ceased. The sight of it was actually distressing. Why didn’t Kakashi release it?

Kakashi swallowed thickly.

A small sound escaped Iruka’s throat, and he leaned back in his chair. “Oh.” Immediately, Kakashi’s and Tenzou’s eyes swerved over to him, the contrast between their irises almost like day and night.

Why would anyone make such a mess of their system on purpose? Kakashi didn’t release his chakra because he _couldn’t_. Gods, he wished Madara was here with his Sharingan to tell him whether he was right, whether Kakashi’s chakra points were short-circuiting like Iruka imagined them to be.

“You’re bound. Right? You can’t tell us because you’re not allowed to. Is it a curse?”

Tenzou’s face fell and with it he dropped his arms from their defensive position. Kakashi, though, just stared back at Iruka, one single grey eye widening.

“How did you know?” Kakashi’s voice was quiet, but urgent.

Iruka looked at Tenzou briefly, letting him know that he wasn’t lying here. “There’s something that’s keeping you from speaking freely and your – “ Iruka waved into Kakashi’s general reaction, but faltered. “It’s hard to look at it too long. It’s like what I imagine an energetic maze to look like when I look at you, just that there are several of them layered over each other.”

Neither Tenzou nor Kakashi said a word.

Iruka grew uneasy under their scrutiny. He shrugged. “I’m good with curses and the like,” he answered weakly.

Tenzou, at last, snorted. That fucker.

In his orange sweater, the material looking as soft as a cloud, Kakashi kept his stare trained on Iruka, as if he was trying to solve a riddle. “I haven’t met anyone who recognised it in a long time.” The silence stretched and Iruka was almost moved to say anything to break it but then Kakashi seemed to recollect his train of thought. “I haven’t thought about it in terms of a curse, either. But yes, I can’t speak freely,” he said.

“What happens if you try to?” Tenzou asked.

Both Iruka and Kakashi winced. “It feels like a physical barrier I cannot overcome. One of my – “ His lips went taut. Again, he couldn’t continue. Iruka had paid attention to Kakashi’s chakra and there it was again: a barrier, of some sorts, not letting it out into the natural world. “I’ve been told that going nonverbal can feel like this. But if I still try to push it, there’s some pain, as if I’m starting to burn up from the inside.”

Iruka’s concentration was interrupted as Tenzou pulled out a chair for himself, and sunk down on it. His brother breathed in deeply, his whole face arranged into a quiet expression of dismay, radiating how much he didn’t like this situation.

“So, just to summarize. You need to find Mizuki. Alive? But you can’t tell us why?”

As Kakashi nodded, Iruka blanched. They couldn’t give him an alive Mizuki.

Thankfully, Tenzou wasn’t as much of an open book as Iruka was.

“Alright. I need to talk to my brother for a second, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Kakashi didn’t mind at all. In fact, he looked happy to leave the conversation behind, and escaped the kitchen as soon as he could. “I’ll just be… uh…” He waved a hand at the door to the back porch and Iruka sent him a smile which, he hoped, conveyed that everything would be _fine._ What exactly would be fine Iruka had no clue, though. But the need to fix and take care of the world around him had always been a prominent theme for Iruka.

As soon as the door closed, Iruka snapped his fingers. The air around them gave a sudden popping noise, as if they had entered another altitude and the pressure balance was off. With the kitchen protected from prying ears, Iruka put his head into his hands and stared at Tenzou out of shellshocked eyes.

“We need to tell him.”

“Tell him that the man he’s looking for is buried in our garden? Dead?” Tenzou asked and frowned at a scratch in the wooden surface of the dinner table.

Iruka thought that the ‘dead’ part was kind self-explanatory, but he wasn’t going to say it.

“I don’t know, Iruka. Considering that we don’t know anything about him, let alone what he wants from Mizuki, we shouldn’t. It’s subtle, but I’m pretty sure I can smell the forest on him. What if Kakashi’s from the same place as him? Forest folk. And nothing good comes out of that forest.”

Rationally, Iruka knew that Tenzou had a damn good point. After all, it had been him who had gotten almost killed. At that thought, Iruka knocked on the table with his knuckles, three little raps. Tenzou’s raised one single eyebrow at him but didn’t ask what thought had brought this on.

“But you came out of the forest,” Iruka said quietly. “And you’re one of the best things that ever happened to me.”

Tenzou let out a sigh that spoke of volumes of his weariness. “’Ruka.”

Iruka cradled his knees to his chest. This seemed to be one of the rare moments in which he couldn’t feel the curse guarding his heart, could only think about how fragile it was.

He shook his head a little. A gesture to ground. It was his same foolish heart said Kakashi’s intentions were sincere, that whatever he was trying for wasn’t only worth their attention, but that it _needed_ it. This is what they had been doing for people all over the town and county either way: aiding them where they could. Iruka didn’t even know how it had started, just that Hashirama was always busy inviting people over for a cup of tea, letting guests choose their own strain out of his collection of over thirty assembled teas, and already getting a picture of what fear, what concern had brought them to him in the first place. While Hashirama had chosen this path, Madara had his own reserved way of caring. Not only was there history between the Uminos and this land – Madara’s family had been tied to the forest for centuries, far longer than this town existed probably. Iruka had never gotten the full story of how Hashirama and Madara had met, just that they had known each other since their childhoods when Iruka wasn’t even born, and that there had been a feud between their families, resulting in a lot of pain and grief on either side. Still, their stories had always meant to picture Madara and Hashirama together.

“We need to figure out what to do with the body either way.”

Tenzou looked very tired. “You know that I don’t enjoy being an asshole. I just don’t want this to blow up in our faces.”

Iruka dragged his fork through a puddle of maple syrup, trying to staunch his growing frustration. “And with that you mean in my face, and in Hashirama and Madara’s faces.”

Tenzou shrugged. “You know me.”

Iruka studied him. Of course, he knew him. From finding Tenzou as he was dying in the clearing all those years back and onward, he had known him, all his faults and vices, the way he was wired, what ticked him off. For example, Tenzou’s strong dislike of chocolate or his nerd-level love for gothic architecture. Tenzou was his brother, after all.

A loud yawn from Iruka surprised them both. His uneasy sleep caught up to him. “You’re not being an asshole. You’re just being a little mean. Well-intentioned, buuuut…” He switched into a high-pitched voice towards the end of the sentence.

Tenzou muttered something under his breath, sounding like a grumbling bear rather than a human, and despite his exhaustion, and the tension, Iruka had to smile at the display. Tenzou blew out a breath, making the strands of loose his hair on his forehead fly up. Iruka watched him ease into his routine of overthinking and overanalysing, and cut in before he could get too deep.

“At least let me have at what’s keeping him bound. Just while we figure out what to do. If shit blows up, Hashirama and Madara come back in two weeks and we can flee the country before they come back and find the house wrecked.”

Tenzou barked out a laugh, and soon Iruka joined him.

Before Iruka got up to find Kakashi outside, however, Tenzou levelled one look at him, laughter still written over his face. His next words didn’t match the expression, though.

“I wish that you turned to caring for yourself in the same way you do for others, Iruka.”

Iruka put a hand on Tenzou’s shoulder in passing, gently squeezing it once. He left without a word because there was nothing he could say that could convince Tenzou to believe a lie.

~*~*~

“Your brother doesn’t trust me.”

Kakashi had trailed up the stairs after Iruka, and was on his heels as walked into the room they reserved for guests. It was small. A double-sized bed fit just so, with a wide window facing to the east and letting the sun warm it up in the early mornings.

Iruka pulled out some of the bedding that was stuffed into the closet, and went about putting the fresh linen on it. With a swift movement coming from his upper arms, he shook out the linen for the mattress, gestured for Kakashi to grab the opposite end and help him heft it onto the mattress without wrinkles.

“To be fair, you met him at a really bad time.” As he was choosing his words, Iruka winced. “He had something happen to him recently, and this is the immediate aftermath you caught Tenzou in.”

The reason he was making up the guest room for Kakashi now was no other than that the only inn in town, _Wolf’s Den_ , happened to be closed. He suspected that the owners, a family of shifters, went out of state to celebrate the impeding blood moon. It was a coincidence really, one that meant Iruka would have company while Tenzou left the town again, not that he was lonely or anything.

A pot of devil’s ivy was propped in an upper corner of the room, dangling from the ceiling in an old macramé hanger. It had begun to creep along the curtain rod, and was in the process of eating up the area around the window. Iruka loved the green taking over the room, and took care of the ivy as best as he could because, really, all ivy wanted was to be ignored.

Kakashi remained quiet but Iruka was no fool and noticed how he was being studied.

The brothers had settled for this: Iruka hadn’t wanted to lie to Kakashi but in the end they didn’t disclose the grave in the garden. Instead, Tenzou agreed to help Kakashi trace back his ‘steps’, because technically Tenzou had dragged Mizuki across the ground, while they tried to figure out what the hell was going on. And although Kakashi must have noticed something in the way that Iruka and Tenzou had kept exchanging not-glances because they were full-on _looks_ , Kakashi had been more than grateful. Not necessarily verbally thankful, but Iruka swore he could have grabbed Kakashi’s relief out of the air, almost like he had wanted to hold Madara and Hashirama’s words from that argument years ago Iruka hadn’t been meant to hear.

Iruka went to open the window to let some air in before the afternoon heat hit the streets. A breeze met him as he pulled the curtains, light and billowing, apart and Iruka closed his eyes on instinct, breathing in. Birds chirped their midday songs.

Kakashi stepped up to his side. “This is what your uncles do for a living?”

“Kind of. They don’t expect payment for what they do. It’s more like… they’re giving back, I guess. Giving back to this town, and this land. Sounds very New Age-esque but I swear they’re neither involved in a cult nor in a pyramid scheme.”

That coaxed a laugh out of Kakashi and Iruka quickly averted his eyes, smiling to himself despite his heartbeat speeding up.

“Ah, Iruka, and here I was thinking that you were trying to recruit me for your order.”

When Iruka looked back up, Kakashi was already watching him. His ears were pierced too, the bells of the piercings black instead of silver like the one above his upper lip.

“You asked about my uncles and not about me.”

For a moment they stared at each other, and even though Kakashi only had one eye open, Iruka felt so visible that he wanted to hide. But he also did not, because being watched like this sent a tingle of exhilaration down his spine. Iruka considered his point, his literal point and where he was standing, and how close Kakashi was to touch, and to – to kiss even because it had been a while since Iruka had been kissed by anyone. The men he had slept with in the last year or two he had picked up while staying at Tenzou’s empty apartment uptown, at the area’s grimiest gay bar that played 80s music, theme parties with neon paint a regular Wednesday night event, complete with drinks too expensive for Iruka’s liking. During his one-night stands that were generally… well, Iruka couldn’t complain about the sex when the only parameter to consider was getting off, he refused to be kissed. It felt too intimate. Too close on the border of something he couldn’t want. And something he usually didn’t want. But whatever it was about Kakashi – for Iruka blamed it entirely on him, on his looks, on the quiet upturn of his lips at his mouth’s corners, the curve of his cupid’s bow, the beauty mark on his chin but naively also how he seemed to listen with his full attention whenever Iruka was speaking, and seemed so genuinely intrigued in Iruka’s ideas – he would kill to kiss him right now. But just because Iruka wanted to it didn’t mean that Kakashi felt the same way.

At least that’s what he thought before Kakashi’s gaze darted to his his mouth.

Iruka’s throat went dry.

It was so easy to lean forward, to let his centre of gravity be pulled towards Kakashi. It might have been the easiest thing Iruka had ever done. Easier than the seasons replacing each other in their long-practiced, perfect waltz. Easy as his breath coming and going, it was so –

At the edge of his vision Iruka saw a flash of dark. With an irritated gasp, he pushed Kakashi away, draping his own body over Kakashi’s, as not even one second later a raven came crashing through the open window and landed in a shrieking mess on the floor.

There was no blood. (The first thing Iruka usually checked for whenever _anything_ happened.) There were, however, red eyes and frantic cawing. It seemed as if the raven struggled against an invisible hold, and only when it managed to get up onto its feet did Iruka break out of his shock. He stepped forward and leaned down.

“Iruka, wait,” Kakashi called out, right at his back.

“It’s okay,” he answered automatically because it was. It would have to be. He didn’t think he’d ever seen Madara receive a raven like this, but it surely didn’t mean anything serious. Maybe it had gotten spooked on its way. Iruka reached out a hand, not to touch the wild animal, he was smarter than that, but to show that he was one of his uncle’s, to allow the raven to take in his scent and familiarise itself with its surroundings.

The raven was fluttering with its wings, losing feathers as dark as pitch, and pushing out its chest. The sight of an animal in distress was unsettling, Iruka thought, only used to the sight of humans acting out.

The raven finally recognised him. It hopped forward, one step, two steps, before its beak turned still, frozen, and then – towards Kakashi. The bird gave off a shriek so loud that Iruka felt it move through his bones, and spread its wings, ready for an attack.

Kakashi shot forward and seized the bird by its neck, the animal struggling and practically hissing at his touch, and Iruka could only stare. The raven’s wings beat against Kakashi’s chest, its claws scratching at what exposed skin he could find, instantly leaving bloody trails behind. And then the raven went for Kakashi’s face, his beak, knife-sharp, missing Kakashi’s scarred eyelid just so.

Kakashi struggled and tried to reinforce his grip on the animal but it clicked and screeched from deep down its body, and kept trying to claw at his eyes. It took Iruka too long – always too long – to shake off his horror before he moved into gear and snatched a blanket from the wardrobe that was still open – and in one swift motion he had wrapped it around the flailing mess of wings and feathers, with just the raven’s head poking out.

“Stop it! Stop it at once!” he snarled and like magically, the raven went still. A moment of quiet before the raven gave a tiny cluck.

Iruka’s jaw dropped. “Excuse me, _what was that?_ ” No response. That was more like it.

“What were you thinking, huh? I don’t know why you thought it’s okay to barge in and attack a guest, but we have rules here _._ ” Iruka cradled the bundle in his arms and scowled at the raven, knowing that he had its full attention. “And if you don’t stick to them, you are not welcome. So, what do you have to say for yourself? What’s your business?”

The raven struggled in a weak attempt but ultimately, ducked his head.

Iruka looked up and met Kakashi’s stare, his eyebrows almost reaching his hairline. His hair was a rosy, tousled mess and a flush lay over his cheeks. Iruka only needed another glance to see how Kakashi’s chakra was coiling like a serpent, ready to strike if it could.

Iruka’s waning focus snapped the raven’s attention back to Kakashi and it started again with its flare of anger. Kakashi remained composed but Iruka still noticed, in the line of his shoulders, how he recoiled.

“Unbelievable!” Iruka huffed and turned on his tail to leave the room. “What _is it_? Do you want to eat him, or what? Because you’re a tiny bird and that’s a grown-ass man and if someone’s gonna get eaten in this scenario it’s you!” The bird gave a sound as if it wanted to say, _yes, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do, you stupid human!_ and Iruka had had it up to here.

“If you can’t behave, you’re leaving. Easy as that. You want to speak to anyone in here, you’ve got to come through the door, like you were told to do by your guardian, alright? You want me to snitch to Madara about this?”

He didn’t notice that Kakashi trailed after him, stare fixed on the animal and posture guarded. What he did notice, however, was the raven’s reaction to Madara’s name which was not the reaction he had hoped for. Instead of falling into a final silence, the raven just about spat straight poison. With an angry huff, Iruka crossed the kitchen, opened the backdoor and shook out the blanket full of a ruffled and outraged raven.

The audacity, Iruka thought to himself, indignant to have been embarrassed like this in front of their guest, and with an apologetic face he turned around to go check up on Kakashi.

Who was standing just a few feet in front of him, both eyes open, one the colour of light grey-blue, the other a deep crimson.

Iruka almost jumped out of his skin. “Holy shit!”

Quickly, Kakashi closed the eye that was blood-red. He looked like a deer caught in the headlights of a truck.

But Iruka was on him right this instant. Call it his lack of self-preservation, but he crossed the distance between them, stopping shortly before they came nose to nose.

“You have a _Sharingan_ ,” Iruka whispered, too many emotions at once clogging his throat. He grabbed Kakashi’s wrists that were hanging loosely next to him. With a start, he realised that the raven had picked up on it without seeing it, probably sensing on the similarity to Madara’s presence, and that the raven had wanted to pick it out.

“Where did you get it?”

Kakashi tried for a blank expression but he might as well have been a book specifically dedicated to Iruka – he saw the hurt flash up in his grey eye, the pain taunting the straight line of his lips, the urge to run away in his gaze that darted to the right, scarcely perceptible.

“It was a gift,” he said weakly.

Iruka’s mind was reeling. What was that supposed to mean? And above all, he needed to get Kakashi out of here because Madara could see, and because Iruka didn’t know how he would react, the topic of his family so full of pain and rage for his uncle that Iruka wanted to spare him from any of it.

“A gift from whom?” Iruka insisted, pressing down lightly on his wrists, but careful not to hurt. He noticed that his hands, as well as Kakashi’s, were slightly shaking.

“A friend. He died.”

Iruka’s voice was growing a little bit hysterical. “I need you to be a little more specific than that.”

“It’s – “ Kakashi looked away. He faltered and Iruka saw the surges of panic growing inside of him from how his chakra was straining against its invisible borders. Just then, Iruka noticed that the scratches on Kakashi’s hands were still bleeding.

So he did what he knew to do best. He gave Kakashi’s wrists a little squeeze and nodded at him, trying to convey that he wasn’t here to provide any judgements but that he _needed_ to know. “Will you tell me while I patch you up?” he asked, eyes and voice full of honesty.

Kakashi slowly opened both his eyes again. Iruka didn’t withdraw, didn’t budge at the sight. “I’ll be fine. They’ll heal on their own.” Iruka heard the unspoken pleas of _I don’t want to put this on you, I’ve learned how to deal with life on my own, I’m used to being alone, I don’t think I could stand letting another person in_ as if he was the one raising them.

When Iruka had an anxiety attack, often brought on by days of neglecting himself emotionally, one of the mantras he clung to was that even the terrible squeeze in his chest and the cramping of his stomach and the air pulled out from him lungs were only momentarily and that no feeling, no matter how terrible, could last forever. And at the very least, that his body would tire of his shaking hands and racing heart eventually and let him drown in exhausted sleep.

Yes, no feeling was final. But Iruka also thought that one of life’s gifts was to see feelings change and take on different connotations so that “I’m used to being alone” could grow into a “I don’t have to be alone” with but a little care, and a little love. 

There were bags under Kakashi’s eyes that he only noticed now in the half-shade of the kitchen, as the sun wandered along the sky. “Please,” Iruka asked.

And whatever fight he had in him, it left Kakashi right then and there. He nodded.

~*~*~

Iruka went over the scratches with a cotton swab, soaked into rubbing alcohol. Kakashi was propped on the edge of the bathtub as Iruka knelt before him. Kakashi’s hand in his own was lighter than a feather and every time he had to look away, to grab another utensil from their medical kit, he half-expected it to be gone and Kakashi too.

“I wasn’t a nice kid,” Kakashi started after a while. They had shared a comfortable silence before, Iruka working carefully on Kakashi’s broken skin. “My father died early, I have never met my mother, and I kept away from others and close to myself.” Iruka nodded to show that he had his full attention, wrapping his head around the fact that Kakashi was an orphan too.

“I think your brother has noticed that I grew up in the forest as well. And I don’t want to explain this to you because you must know it already but the forest isn’t what it used to be once. Before, you had whatever you can imagine living there. So I was alone but not for long.”

Iruka did know.

From a young age on, Iruka had been taught that if he saw, smelled, or sensed traces of fae, that he had to turn on his heels and not stop until he found Hashirama or Madara. He had heard stories of this gruelling folk, and how they liked to charm humans and creatures alike into submission. He head heard stories of enough souls, teetering on the edge of life, driven by their desperation that life’s turns and twists had brought onto them, forgetting their pockets full of salt, their rowanberries, their iron necklaces when breaching the land of the fae. As a child, Iruka didn’t know what to make of them. Hadn’t understood why his uncles weren’t as happy about Iruka’s affinity to translate other worlds’ customs: to know what it meant when a fox as white as snow appeared three nights in a row behind their house, walking on just its hindlegs, or to grasp the significance of butterflies appearing out of thin air and covering every inch of his skin. Iruka had been too young to understand why Madara was patrolling the woods because no one had told him that the forest, the one in their backyard, the one that stretched on and on forever, that was far greater than a human mind could gather, had once been written to the family name of Uchiha. And even though the forest had been unlawfully claimed and infested by a sickness no offering of honeyed milk or freshly baked bread could appease, Madara still saw to his duty, dreaming of a day where the forest would be forest again, not haunted. Because a forest which haunted more often than not signified that the forest was being haunted itself.

(Madara did not share his dreams. He was ashamed of them. He was ashamed that the dreams had begun creeping into his mind when the anger from his family’s death had lessened just a fraction, enough for an idea to fester: That, maybe, if he could cleanse the forest, if he could take back the land, then he would make amends with his ancestors for surviving when he shouldn’t have.

And although Madara didn’t share his dreams, he had shared most of his life with Hashirama. And Hashirama was as kind just as he was clever.

A hand holding his when falling asleep had made it easier to breathe through the shame.)

Iruka was roused from his thoughts when Kakashi reached out and put a loose strand of hair behind Iruka’s ear. Iruka stilled and knew that his face would heat up soon so he went back to working, putting a salve onto the wounds. Thankfully, Kakashi continued to speak while Iruka got his heart under control.

“Although I fought more with him than anyone else, there was a boy who made himself my friend. His name was Obito. He was so loud.” Iruka risked a small look and saw the upturn of Kakashi’s bittersweet smile. “And I was an ass to him most of the time. We were young. We were stupid. When he died in an accident, I was consumed by guilt and considered it my fault. And I went to make a bargain. I bargained with – with a fae and they promised me to save his life but I was a kid. I didn’t have anyone to teach me how to strike a good bargain, or not to strike them in the first place, so I didn’t specifiy that I wanted him alive, as a whole. The fae looked at Obito and saved what they thought was salvageable. And they gave me his eye.”

Iruka shuddered at this, his imagination too copious as to not picture what it really meant when Kakashi said it was ‘given’ to him. He tried to hold out till Kakashi resumed on his own, but found that he couldn’t, not with what he knew would have to be the next part.

“What did you offer, Kakashi?”

“I pledged myself to the court.”

Iruka’s eyes went wide but Kakashi didn’t stop, looking even more flushed than before. He was clearly growing upset with the memory.

“It was my own fault for being so stupid as to bargain with a fae, but I would have given anything.” His voice cracked on its last note. Iruka felt as if now Kakashi was bargaining with him. But for what? For understanding? For atonement? “I would have given anything for him not to die. Instead I got a gift I never wanted and a sentence to serve whom I never wanted to serve.”

Iruka had also heard what it meant to be pledged to the court. Iruka had also heard what it meant to be pledged to the court. Of humans that were stripped of their free-will and turned into empty shells of themselves, every trace of consciousness gone. But it weren’t humans who had to suffer the most since every other creature, as long as they only had a single drop of uncanny blood in them, were not as easily tamed. While they were also stripped off their will, their souls remained intact, watching themselves perform tasks they did not want to.

Iruka let go off Kakashi’s bandaged wrists. Exhaustion wore at his muscles although he was sitting on the bathroom floor. First, Tenzou almost got killed – the prospect of his brother leaving forever like a fresh wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding – and then this. A man at his doorstep that he barely knew, but met in kindness and good faith, unravelling what, in another life, would have remained history.

Iruka closed his eyes and slowly, let his forehead rest against Kakashi’s knee. He was too tired to care.

That was it then. The curse. Kakashi was still bound to the court and as such wasn’t free to speak about what he needed from Mizuki. It was so easy to see, now, even through his sleep-deprived haze.

Another thought weighed him down. Because Tenzou was always right and Iruka often cared for others more than he did for himself, Iruka was seized by the desperate wish that Kakashi wouldn’t blame himself anymore.

He didn’t realize that he had said any of this out loud. Seconds later, he was asleep in Kakashi’s arms as he carried Iruka up the stairs and into his bed.

Iruka dreamed up a sky full of red eyes that cried blood. The earth drank it up hungrily.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading, for your kudos, for your comments. i cherish all of them. in fact, i eat them. they fuel me while Iruka and Kakashi screw over all my plans i have once had for this story. also a quick note that the chapter count is likely to increase again!


	4. Part IV

When Iruka opened his eyes, he felt more rested than he had in a long time.

He stretched lazily, snuggling further into his pillow that, no matter how long it had been since he last did laundry, still smelled faintly of fresh laundry. Clean, like a breeze whipping up sundresses and shirts at the beach when the sun was too hot, the heat too pressing without it. Iruka smiled at the visual. It had been so long since he'd gone swimming. His parents had always joked about the fact that as toddler, Iruka had taken to swimming more easily than he had to walking upright. They laughed about this, and insisted that Iruka had taught them how to swim, not the other way around. One day at the local swimming pool his mother had lost sight of Iruka for not even five seconds, and when she found him again he had already made the plunge into the deep water, holding himself above the surface as if it was the most natural thing.

As Hashirama and Madara enjoyed their honeymoon, and Iruka and Tenzou were left to watch the house, Iruka had planned to drive up the beach once his uncles returned. He didn't own a car, actually, but he knew that he could always borrow Madara's battered truck (not that he would ever let Madara hear describe it as 'battered' because he knew the consequences like no one else) and camp out in the truck's bed when the summer nights had turned warm enough to sleep under the open sky.

The longer Iruka remained unmoving, the more he realised there was something uncomfortably pressing against his left side and with a frown he rose to his knees, the duvet falling off his shoulders and pooling around him. Just as he had been talking about battered: Iruka glanced down at the old, stuffed animal, his seal he had been gifted years and years ago. The fur was neither soft nor did it have its brilliant white colour anymore but its goofy smile and bright eyes reminded Iruka of another life lived. He didn't always sleep with the toy but on some nights it seemed too cruel to kick it out of bed. Speaking of which, how had it gotten here? He didn't remember taking it to bed from where it was resting on the rattan arm chair in the corner of his room, looking like he had plucked it right out of a _Living Wild, Living Free_ magazine (when actually, the closer you looked the more traces of age you saw, like the black soot stains from when Tenzou had almost set it on fire with candles).

Iruka patted the stuffed seal for good luck, and rolled out of bed. His bare feet met the hardwood floor, warm from the sun shining through the window. By now, it was standing at the zenith. He was about to make a comment to no one in particular how strangely quiet the house was when the sound of pots and pans banging together filled the air.

Iruka changed into a pair of denim shorts he'd cut off last summer and a loose dress shirt, dipped into a pattern with brightly blooming flowers, the sleeves coming halfway up his arms. The warm colours looked lovely on his brown skin, he knew, and with a feeling of ease he made his way to the bathroom just to strip out of his clothes again for a hot shower. He took the time to carefully comb his hair under the running water, first with his fingers, then with a wide-toothed comb. While Iruka had inherited the auburn-chestnut colour from the Senju branch, he did not have Hashirama's straight hair but a mix of curls and waves that did not like being combed dry.

Finally, he made his way downstairs with his hair loose, falling down his shoulders, to air-dry and padded along the hallway with its walls covered in pictures and other memorabilia. Like the framed newspaper clippings from when Tenzou had won first place at a reading aloud competition in 2nd grade which had made Hashirama cry and Tenzou carry on with his love for everything literature, and the time when Iruka played a tree in a school play who was, unlike one would assume, actually the protagonist of the drama. Making his way past the floor, Iruka took no notice of them, not like a stranger would.

In the kitchen he automatically avoided the sharp corner of the counter Madara still managed to knock into with a few light steps, and grabbed a cup and two nectarines that were sitting in the fruit basket. As he turned around to the backdoor to go sit on the veranda and soak up some sunshine, he was graced with a sight he had not expected.

Out on the grass, shaded by the peach tree that refused to bear more than eleven fruits every summer, but which Hashirama loved too much to cut down, Kakashi and Tenzou sat across from each other on a blanket and talked. To each other. And Tenzou actually looked like he was enjoying himself.

With coffee in one hand, and the other full of delicious fruit, Iruka leaned against the open doorframe and watched the scene in front of him. It was almost enough to make him forget what was going on in his world, and how it was being moved in this and that direction without caring much for anyone’s say, and for all Iruka seemed like an easy-going and friendly person, he disliked having no control over his story. He had cursed himself at the tender age of eleven to determine the course of his life, after all.

Tenzou sat cross-legged with his laptop resting in his lap and was typing and talking at the same time, while Kakashi nodded and threw in what seemed like the occasional thought. Iruka snorted at the thermal jug that stood next to Tenzou, with no doubt filled up to the brim with coffee, his brother too lazy to move his ass to get some more in the kitchen when he finished his first cup. Kakashi had pulled up one of his knees and was resting his chin atop it, the whole scene making him appear lively, and younger, than the nervous and puzzling man Iruka had met but mere days ago. With a start Iruka noticed that Kakashi's hair, pink before, now sprouted a colour that was almost white.

It was then that Kakashi lifted his head and looked straight at Iruka. He smiled at him, and thanks to the distance, Iruka wasn’t able to make out the light dusting of freckles across the bridge of his nose, unlike Tenzou who was freckled like no one’s business, but it didn’t matter because Iruka _knew_ they were there.

Quickly, Iruka lifted the cup to his mouth to hide the size of his own smile. He didn’t even try to fight it.

Soon after, Tenzou realised that Kakashi’s attention was no longer solely on him. He also saw Iruka and called him over to them. The grass under his feet tickled Iruka’s toes and a bumblebee drifted over to peek into his cup as he was walking.

He sat down between Kakashi and Tenzou. It could have rained, it could have stormed, or the sky could have surprised them with snow – Iruka would have still felt the warmth that washed over him, here.

“’Ruka, you okay?”

Tenzou typed a few more words but glanced at Iruka out of the corner of his eyes. He was bad at hiding his worry. Iruka tilted his head to one side, adopting some of Tenzou’s worry to his own expression.

“I feel really good. You wouldn’t believe how well I slept.” Next to Tenzou laid his pleather-bound journal, the same brand he had used for the last ten years when he first took up journaling (emphasis on _journal_ because Tenzou refused to call it his diary when he had already started a budget plan at age fifteen, right after Iruka and Tenzou had given up on their homemade lemonade stand business), Iruka sighted his phone. An image pushed forward from the back of Iruka’s mind.

“Before I forget, can you text Madara that Hashirama forgot his reading glasses at the brasserie they went for brunch yesterday? My phone must be,” he patted his shorts, “in my room.”

Tenzou did so without a question. He shut his laptop, then, and started picking at the black nail polish on his nails. “I’m asking how you are because you’ve slept through a day.”

Iruka almost choked on his coffee. “I did _what?_ ” When he turned to Kakashi, he just nodded in confirmation, shrugging a little.

“I, you know, carried you upstairs and you were out like a light.” Kakashi seemed a little embarrassed to recount the events in front of Tenzou but Iruka didn’t particularly mind. Of course, he’d get an earful later, but Tenzou had witnessed situations that were a hundred times more embarrassing than this. Hell, they went to _high school_ together.

“And you stayed asleep, for hours. Your brother came home eventually, and I told him and he couldn’t wake you up either so we just let you sleep.”

Iruka looked down at his hands. They were a little sticky from the nectarine juice but not uncomfortably so. And because for once he didn’t like the attention, didn’t like how it broke up the ease of this morning, he stayed quiet and took another bite of the second nectarine he brought with him.

“Are you sure you feel alright?” Tenzou asked again and Iruka resisted the urge to snark at him.

Iruka nodded. “I haven’t been sleeping too well.” He truly hadn’t. He had been busy dreaming, he guessed. And after the events of this week, he wasn’t exactly unsettled by his impromptu coma. “But I promise I feel okay.”

Tenzou got up, pocketed his phone, journal in one hand. “I need to run before I’m late for therapy. I’ll be at the library after but let’s have dinner together?” He flipped through his journal to the most recent dogeared page and immediately shot a nasty look at Kakashi. “I can’t read any of that.”

“I’m not the one who wears glasses,” Kakashi said and Iruka bit down on a snicker. “They’re for driving,” Tenzou bit back, “and you’re handwriting is shit.” Kakashi seemed unaffected by Tenzou’s pointed remark. “I stand by my point.”

With a subtle exhale, Iruka released the tension that had creeped into his body through his breath, and smiled up at his brother. “Text me.”

When Tenzou had left, he turned to Kakashi who looked like he was chewing on a question. “Ask,” he said around a mouthful of fruit.

“Do you have prophetic dreams?”

Iruka dropped the fruit pit in his now empty mug. Subconsciously, he reached for the scar on his nose until a hand on his arm stopped him from nervously scratching at it. He met Kakashi’s eye, his face open and encouraging. “Not really. I mean, at least not often. You should see my uncle. We always thought there must be some banshee blood down the family tree with the dreams he used to have. But they’ve gotten better. I just get bits here and there, like knowing that he’s probably about to pick a fight with his husband because he can’t find his glasses and he’s in a mood because of it.”

“My mother used to have them. My dad told me how they would take a toll on her, as if she was living a second life when she went so sleep. I would be exhausted with that, too,” Kakashi mused.

Iruka still felt a tingle where Kakashi had touched his arms seconds before. “Your mother, she wasn’t human either?”

Kakashi shook his head. “She was human, mostly, except for the visions. But my extended family, my clan, definitely wasn’t. It took most people one look to figure it out, but for you it probably would have taken less.” Kakashi was wearing a faint smile.

Iruka didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”

“You picked up on – what did you call it, the buzzing before. You were right in ascribing it to chakra. My clan was given a gift a long time ago, perhaps even before this forest existed, when an ancestor of mine brought life back to the site of an abandoned shrine. As the story goes, it was inhabited by a deity of the sky who had been captured in a moment of weakness because the other spirits were afraid of their power, and then left to be forgotten at the shrine until they would have passed over into oblivion. The deity did not expect anything in return for their gift as all they had wanted was to roam freely again, without any ties to worshippers or enemies. But they made sure that the gift could not be stolen. It’s only passed along outside the bloodline.”

Iruka had completely stilled, drawn in by Kakashi’s voice. He tried to pay attention to every single word, wrapping his head around them. He had read about shrines, and that they weren’t a popular practice in Western culture. Which usually meant that they should not be dismissed easily.

“What was the gift?” he asked. In the background, cicadas were chirping their summer songs. A gust of wind ruffled through the peach tree’s leaves, and in the half-shade, the imprints of their shadow danced on Kakashi’s skin. Iruka’s heart skipped a beat.

Kakashi stretched out his arms in front of his body, turning them so the inside of his wrists were visible. His veins stood out against his pale skin, faintly blue, and strong. “I wish I could show you properly.” At once, his arms went alight with electric sparks. They ran across the length of them, back and forth, darting, but remained under Kakashi’s skin. They reminded Iruka of… lightning.

He gasped and leaned forward, refraining from touching though he instinctively felt drawn to the sight. “That’s it! It looks like it _feels_ when you’re near me.” Iruka was captivated, never having seen anything like it before. “It’s as if the deity took lightning out of the sky.”

“That’s what they did,” Kakashi answered and just like that, the sparks died out. Iruka had to blink a few times until the bright spots in front of his eyes had gone and he could properly see again, and when he looked up Kakashi was wearing a relaxed smile and was watching him.

“Incredible,” Iruka whispered.

Kakashi shrugged and gave a laugh, one that was tinged with pain. “If that’s what it takes to impress you… I can’t release any of it, though. You sensed it from the beginning.”

Iruka didn’t take his eyes off Kakashi. “That’s not what I meant.”

Kakashi’s expression fell away as he, too, stilled. There was it again, the tension, and Iruka remembered all too vividly how he had almost went and kissed him if it hadn’t been for that damned bird. He had been so sure of himself then, two days ago, and now he fumbled for his next words before the silence could grow uncomfortable, and before Kakashi would get up and leave.

“Iruka, I – “

“Your hair,” Iruka blurted. There might have been the faintest flush on Kakashi’s cheeks as he had started to speak, but now confusion was written all over his face.

“My hair?” he asked, his hands going up instinctively to touch it. “Oh, yeah, you said I could use whatever and I find some silver shampoo in the shower upstairs. I wanted to get rid of the colour, anyway.”

Iruka guessed it must have been a left-over bottle from when Tenzou had tried to dye his hair, going through his obligatory goth phase as a teen. “Oh, I was wondering if the colour had washed off. Are you going to bleach it again?”

“No, I don’t use bleach. This is my natural colour, see?” Kakashi parted his hair to reveal roots that were edging between grey and white. “Makes dyeing pretty easy.”

Iruka went for his scar again, wanting to keep his hands busy, but stopped himself halfway. “Huh. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone with hair as light as you. It looks good. I liked the pink too, but I think this fits you better.”

Kakashi had the audacity to smirk.

~*~*~

They had lasagna for dinner.

Tenzou put Kakashi on chopping duty while he prepared the passata. Iruka stirred the bechamel sauce on the stove, careful not to get distracted by the Mamma Mia soundtrack playing in the background as to not let the dish scorch. Tenzou and Iruka took a lot of delight in the tears that the onions brought to Kakashi's eyes while Kakashi tried to assure them the onions had nothing to do with it; rather Meryl Streep's rendition of The Winner Takes It All had him absolutely gutted.

Iruka found this positively crushing. Tenzou, of course, noticed and sent him _looks_.

Once the air in the kitchen had taken on the rich smell of caramelized vegetables, the soffritto prepared with carrots from the garden, Iruka moved the empty oven dish to the counter and like they had done this a million times, the three of them carefully assembled the different layers of the lasagna. In the end, Tenzou, standing between Kakashi and Iruka, slid the baking dish into the preheated oven.

Tenzou went to take a shower and left Kakashi and, typically, Iruka to clean up the mess. As Kakashi did the dirty dishes, Iruka dried them, and they eased into light conversation. Kakashi explained that he helped Tenzou with his thesis draft earlier, as he had actually graduated with a literature degree at a college a few states over. From the way Kakashi skirted around the names of cities and places he had been, Iruka guessed that Kakashi had moved around a lot. It still wasn’t clear to him until what point of his life he had lived in the forest, and when he had managed to leave.

“Do you remember how I asked you whether you’re sure you didn’t want to talk to my uncle when you turned up?” Iruka asked, a thought coming to him.

Kakashi nodded and handed him a large wooden spoon. “I did wonder. I guessed that he’s the one people usually go to for advice?”

“Yes, that and…” Iruka hesitated. In the background, behind the music that was now playing on a low volume, he could still hear the shower running. He didn’t want to go behind Tenzou’s back with this, and he didn’t like lying to his brother, but he had a lot of time to try to think and connect the dots here. Considering how Kakashi slowed down with his washing, he wanted to take the pressure off Iruka.

Iruka sighed a little. A strand of his hair flew up with his exhale and he blew it out of his face again. “It might sound a little paranoid, but I’m always expecting someone or,” his voice turned quieter automatically at this, “some _thing_ to appear and take Hashirama with them.”

If Kakashi thought this was weird he didn’t let it show. “Maa, Iruka. If I were in your place, I would be worried about my family too.” The corners of Kakashi’s eyes crinkled under his small smile, obviously trying to lighten the mood.

Iruka smiled but it felt fake. “I guess so.” He wavered again, anxious to go on. But he had to try and finish what he started. “Did Tenzou mention to you how he was adopted?”

Kakashi shook his head. “I gathered that he’s ex-forest, too.” At Iruka’s snort, he shrugged. “It’s what I call them, or myself, in my head. What, suddenly _that’s_ too weird?”

Iruka laughed at Kakashi’s teasing tone and averted his eyes. By now he had started to avoid looking too long at Kakashi out of fear that the man could notice how attracted he was to him just by taking one look at Iruka.

“And he must have been young when he left. Because I could tell he had some questions although he didn’t ask many, about the court systems.”

“He was young. But he doesn’t remember much, likely because of the trauma. I was ten when we found him, or, well, when I found him. And the way…” Iruka’s vision glazed over with the colour of blood. He blinked it away. “Even then it looked to me like he had been put out for us to find. He was hurt, badly, but if they really wanted to kill him, they could have done so. Sometimes I wonder whether he was bait.”

Kakashi’s hands stilled. For a moment, he just held them under the running water, sponge in one hand. Little dish soap bubbles floated upwards, and Iruka already panicked, thinking how to take his words back. But then Kakashi moved, very slowly, and turned off the tap. “Bait for whom?” His face was void of expression.

Iruka swallowed. “For Hashirama.” His pulse was picking up. He had never shared this with anyone, had never written it down and let his thoughts take up presence. Iruka had always been cautious with what he said out of fear that his words could speak things into existence. “Since I can remember he has never gone into the forest. Only Madara. I know that when they were young, Hashirama and Madara had both spent most of their time there. And I never found it odd that Hashirama wouldn’t come with us, or with Madara, when he was walking the woods but…” Iruka put down the cup he was drying, scared that Kakashi could see how his hands were beginning to shake.

“I can’t help but feel that this isn’t the end of it. That all these years they have been lying in wait, and that we have been fooling ourselves by blocking it out. What with Tenzou and Mizuki this week I – “

Iruka froze. Oh, shit.

Kakashi tilted his head. “Tenzou and Mizuki?”

“With – “ Gods, he had fucked up. But it wasn’t too late, he hadn’t said too much, had he? Iruka just needed to get his act together before he started to panic for real. “With Tenzou and Mizuki as in… Tenzou realised that he was being stalked.” He didn’t dare to look at Kakashi. He couldn’t tell him the truth, not without Tenzou’s approval. And by now he was too afraid that if he did put his cards on the table, that Kakashi would be furious at how they could have kept this from him. After all, Kakashi had come here for help on cutting off his own ties to a world that kept on taking.

“What if they are growing impatient now, and because they couldn’t get to Hashirama in one way, they are now trying to take Tenzou _back_?” The thought almost killed him. And Iruka knew that he wasn’t too far off, not with what Tenzou had said about Mizuki and his words of the court needing Tenzou back alive. But they didn’t own Tenzou. Did they? Did the court own Kakashi because he was still bound to it? He always tried to persuade himself that no one owned Tenzou, that Hashirama and Madara had taken him into their family so he could live a life away from the violence. But what if none of them had been meant for a life of peace?

“I don’t know what I would do if he left. I’m aware that this sounds very unhealthy but he’s my brother, Kakashi. Sometimes I still think it’s my fault that my parents died, and if I can’t keep him from this, it will be my fault too.”

“Iruka. Look at me.”

Iruka blinked rapidly, thinking that if he just wanted enough, if he was strong enough, he could stop his tears from spilling over. But Iruka didn’t feel strong. Right now, he felt very, very small.

He couldn’t bring himself to look up at Kakashi. As if stuck to the ground, he stood there, staring down at the counter. This wasn’t like him. Yes, Iruka cried about many things and he wasn’t ashamed of his tears, but he was used to, _should be_ used to the price of a reality where spells, curses, and magic existed. But then again, he had never asked for this. Just like his family’s curse, he had never asked for any of this.

He heard Kakashi move and noticed at the edge of his perception that he went to grab a dish towel but then there were hands pulling at his. Kakashi tugged at him until Iruka turned away from the counter and towards him. “Come on,” he coaxed Iruka, but oh so gently, his hands warm from the water, and his skin soft but calloused at his joints. “It’s just me.”

No, Iruka thought. It’s not ‘just’ him. It was also another reminder that moments like these were temporary. They could never be Iruka’s for longer than that. Iruka looked up.

The careful way in which Kakashi’s fingers moved over his cheeks, wiping away the tears from his eyes while new ones were still welling up, contrasted the lightning that had run through his body earlier.

“Those are a lot of ‘what if’s’ there. What if things went okay, though?”

Iruka’s laugh came out humourlessly. “I don’t feel like this will turn out okay. I really don’t.”

Kakashi opened both his eyes. He seemed to search his face. “Want to know what I think?”

Iruka nodded before Kakashi had finished his sentence.

“Most of my life hasn’t been steady in a good way. And whatever good was thrown at me was very fleeting. I don’t carry a sense of home with me. But I’ve been invited into your home with nothing but kindness although you didn’t know where I’m from, and you didn’t know what I’ve done in my past. I don’t do ‘what if’s’ because I usually don’t get that far, because I don’t think into the future. But I see you, and your brother, and I hear you talk about your uncles, and I think all of it,” he shrugged a little and let his eyes sweep over the room, “all of what has happened up to here must have been worth enduring if this is where I am, on this day. And I think that whatever will happen, Iruka, you can be scared or terrified, but I think you also underestimate yourself, and how we see you, and that the outcome of this is not written into stone.”

In the back of his mind, Iruka registered how the shower turned off. Right now, though, Iruka wrapped his arms around Kakashi and let himself be held for just a little while.

Gods, he needed to be honest with Kakashi. Soon.

~*~*~

The sun had set, dip-painting the garden into darker hues, by the time the oven clock called for attention. The three of them decided not to sit at the kitchen table for this. Tenzou dug out some old birthday paper plates from fuck knows where and drowned the Hello Kitty print in heaps of lasagna with a saccharine smile.

Tenzou sat down on the porch, putting his plate aside while he set up the first season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine on his laptop. The birds’ and insects’ chirping, settling for the night, was almost loud enough to drown out the characters’ voices but Iruka didn’t mind. He wasn’t intent on watching anyway, his head to wrapped around thoughts he couldn’t just acknowledge and let go but had to tear apart before he put them back together.

He thought about Kakashi’s words, and how he couldn’t even begin to understand what Kakashi meant with them, or where he was coming from. He was angry at himself for getting his feelings into this, his worries specifically because they were his own and had nothing to do with anyone else. Iruka had managed just fine, and that wouldn’t change because of anything, he tried to tell himself. But at the same time he couldn’t help but reach out for that place around his heart, the string that seemed to be wrapped tightly around it, and test its hold. It terrified him to find it loosened.

His family’s curse had taken up space in a shadowed spot in the back of his mind – Iruka didn’t talk about it with Tenzou, or his uncles, or with anyone. By cursing himself not to fall in love, he had made sure that he wouldn’t _need_ to talk about it. But he was scared now. What if it hadn’t worked? What if he had been living a lie all these years, just thinking that it had worked? But Iruka knew in his soul that there hadn’t been anyone else, anyone that he loved other than his family. The possibility of losing them was a different kind of torture that kept him awake at night.

Kakashi must have sensed him tense up, because he was seated next to Iruka on the porch swing. When fingers came to wrap around his, Iruka went warm all over, from head to toe.

He snuck a glance at their intertwined fingers but didn’t dare to look up at Kakashi. He wondered what he would say if Iruka told him about his family’s curse. As a stranger to Leafwood, chances were high that Kakashi had never heard of it. To most people in their town, it was more of a strange quirk to the Uminos, one that was easily forgotten since Iruka didn’t exactly broadcast it. His mother had died of cancer when he was young, and his father had been taken by grief not long after, and to this day Iruka couldn’t exactly figure out in what way the curse had worked. Had the curse made his mother sick, so his father would be seized by his mourning? Or would she have gotten sick anyway, and the curse made sure that Iruka’s father wouldn’t have to live too long with the aftermath?

A squeeze behind his sternum told Iruka that he was getting ahead of himself. There was no use pondering the morbidity of his family, of the magic, because he couldn’t undo any of it. Once again, he found himself glad that he was related to Hashirama through his father’s side; at least this branch of his family would remain unaffected. Hashirama didn’t deserve a fate like that.

A weight lay in the pit of Iruka’s stomach and he willed himself to breathe through the nausea that was daring to take over, not wanting Tenzou to notice. Because then Tenzou would make _sure_ that Iruka spilled all his shit, and he was good at it too, but Iruka wasn’t ready. Let him keep his fears to himself a little longer. Iruka didn’t know who he was without them.

With his free hand, since the other was occupied with being held, he crammed a spoon (Iruka always ate lasagna with a spoon) of the dish into his mouth, swallowing although the flavours were too hot on his tongue. He chewed, and swallowed, and shoved down the memory of when Hashirama had taught him how to use their oven all those years ago, that soft words worked better with the stubborn thing than a harsh command.

The lasagna was delicious. And if Iruka hadn’t spent the last twenty minutes crying, he might have teared up.

~*~*~

“Can you pass me my phone? It should be on the swing.”

Up until now, Iruka hadn’t even been aware that Kakashi owned a phone. It was one of those stereotypes about magic folk that Iruka tried his best to avoid but was apparently still susceptible to. He pushed himself up from where he was sketching down notes on his tablet for his law class he was obligated to take and fetched Kakashi’s phone for him. It was a simple black thing, without a single crack or scratch, no brand name printed anywhere. It definitely looked better than Iruka’s old Android that was barely holding itself together but he’d rather struggle with it for another year than go through the hassle of buying a new one. Maybe Iruka had attachment issues. What about it?

He didn’t know if he had touched and invisible button or whether Kakashi had gotten a notification right at that second, but the black display went alight and Iruka came face to face with a picture of dogs. A lot of adorable, tail-wagging dogs, lying in a heap on the ground, probably in a park considering the leashes that were all guiding back to the person behind the camera.

And because Iruka had no filter and there really was no better way than to say “Hi, I have just gotten a glimpse into your life that you haven’t voluntarily shared with me,” Iruka gasped loudly. Which was not the best choice, as Kakashi’s head shot up alarmingly fast.

Iruka all but thrust the phone at him and with eyes wider than the moon, and a voice completely entranced by what he had just seen, he asked: “Kakashi. Do you have _dogs_?”

Kakashi was visibly relieved. “Oh. Yeah, those are mine.” He looked a little sheepish, smiling a crooked smile, and one of his hands went to scratch at the back of his neck. Iruka had meanwhile strode over to him and as Kakashi took his phone from Iruka’s hand, Iruka stood frozen to the spot and stared down at Kakashi.

“Where are they?”

Kakashi glanced up at him. He had to squint, the sun standing high behind Iruka. Tomorrow it would rain.

“Who?”

Iruka’s hands twitched. He realised that he knew next to nothing about Kakashi. But instead of letting that fact get to his head, he decided that he was going to change it.

“The dogs, Kakashi.”

He must have come across as a little intense because Kakashi shrunk under his gaze. Good for him. No one should keep the presence of dogs hidden from Iruka Umino-Senju. He flopped down to the ground next to Kakashi and immediately picked at the grass, a nervous habit from his childhood.

“Where do you even live?”

Kakashi let out a little sound as if he had been expecting this question to arise sooner or later. “I live about four hours down north.”

“Which city?”

Kakashi looked away from here he had been studying Iruka. He looked uncomfortable, again. Iruka briefly wondered how long it had been since Kakashi had stayed with someone else. “I have a cabin. In the woods. That’s where they are staying. The dogs.”

Iruka let off the grass and kneeled forward, trying to get Kakashi to meet his eyes. “Oh, no, don’t tell me they’re on their own. You could have brought them with you!”

“They’re a handful, Iruka. And they’ll be fine on their own. They’re not usual dogs.”

Tell him why he loved it so much every time Kakashi said his name like he wanted to drink it?

Iruka wasn’t satisfied with that answer, however. He followed the lead that he felt hanging in the air. Hashirama and Madara had been right about that, Iruka _was_ good with the in-between spaces, the words that wanted to take up space in the air but never managed to leave their home. “Are they your summons?”

Kakashi let his hand fall from where he’d been looking through his phones.

“You know what summons are?” he asked, incredulously.

Iruka rolled his eyes in a good-natured attempt to show Kakashi what a silly question that had been. “I may live in a little town in the middle of nowhere but I’ve also been raised in a little town in the middle of nowhere where things are very much not normal, Kakashi.”

Kakashi averted his eye, embarrassment starting to show in how he was fiddling with the phone in his hands without actually doing anything.

Iruka smiled fondly. But when it became clear that Kakashi wasn’t going to say anything unless Iruka would, he put on his best puppy eyes (ha!) and scooted a little closer to where Kakashi was sitting.

“Could you show me? If you want to.”

“I didn’t exaggerate when I said they’re a lot.”

“How many do you have?”

“Eight,” Kakashi replied but seemed to think better of it. “Well, seven. Pakkun’s the leader and I don’t really own him as much as he owns me.” He grinned at that, bright and young, and Iruka stared for a bit. “If you’d like, yeah, I can summon them.” Kakashi was still grinning but there was something else on his face too – hope, or light – it was beautiful as it was scary.

“You’re not afraid of big dogs? Because Bull’s a bulldog and he is, you know, big.”

“ _Kakashi_ ,” he all but whined. “I appreciate it but please let me see the dogs _._ ”

Kakashi reached inside his shirt and brought a necklace forward, an iron pendant in the shape of a little blade attached to it. He sliced his palm open with the blade as if he had done this a thousand times, and pressed his hand down to the ground in front of him. And although Iruka knew about summons, he was no witness to the act of summoning from so close. He watched as Kakashi whispered words in a language that wasn’t his own, how his hand took on the icy cold blue glow of the lightning chakra, before a noticeable pressure build in the air around them.

Kakashi’s summons appeared with a puff of smoke. It was an impressive image, eight dogs clustered close together, snouts up high and ears pricked up. In the very front, though, sat a small pug with an expression almost deadpan. His muzzle was ringed with grey hair. He might have been the smallest, but he was obviously the oldest.

“Yo, boss.”

Before Kakashi could answer, a ball of fur broke off the pack and flung itself at Iruka.

“Oh, a new human! A new human!” The ball of fur in question turned out to be a dog with tan-coloured fur and long droopy ears. “He smells so nice, like sunshine and fresh grass and apples!”

His eyes were ringed with dark circles, almost as if he had eyebags, and his tongue was hanging out of his mouth adorably. A symbol had been imprinted onto his forehead, right between his eyes. And most importantly, he was frantically running circles around Iruka before coming to a standstill with his paws on Iruka’s knees, trying to slobber all over Iruka’s face. Iruka surprised himself with his laugh.

“Bisuke! Heel!” Kakashi bellowed.

Bisuke did not heel. In fact, he was fractions away from climbing Iruka entirely, jumping up and down, and Iruka couldn’t keep his giddy laughter in anymore. “Good boy!” was all he managed in-between his giggles, running his hands over the overexcited puppy’s head.

A shadow fell over them as Kakashi latched onto Bisuke’s collar and pulled him off. Iruka’s hands immediately reached after them and he got a few licks from Bisuke in response.

“Bisuke, we talked about this,” Kakashi tried for a serious face but he looked so ridiculous scowling at a puppy that Iruka just kept laughing harder, tears springing to his eyes. “Sorry, ‘Ruka, Gods,” Kakashi murmured while holding Bisuke up by the scruff at his neck. “You could have at least waited until I told you you could come play.”

Bisuke struggled in Kakashi’s grip. “Pleaaaaase can I play?”

Kakashi turned towards Iruka with an expression so deadpan that Iruka almost didn’t register what Kakashi had said. “What did you just call me?”

Kakashi put Bisuke down and the dog raced back to its pack who were staring at Iruka expectantly. “Uh, ‘Ruka? Sorry, it just slipped out, I won’t call you – “

Iruka smiled at him. “Don’t apologize, it’s fine. I like it.”

Kakashi looked back at him. His mouth was drawn into an unreadable line, grey eye as well as Sharingan exposed. It was still a strange sight to get accustomed too, as Iruka only associated it with Madara and only when danger was lurking at the edges of the forest.

“You’re Iruka, then. I’m Pakkun.” Iruka managed to tear his gaze away from Kakashi and towards his front where the pug was treading over to Kakashi.

A little surprised that he knew Iruka’s name, Iruka nodded. He wanted to send Kakashi a questioning look, but Kakashi stood up and took the few steps that separated him from his pack. He ruffled through their fur here and there, and let them nip at his jaw, and Iruka watched Kakashi smile so unguarded that it tugged at his heart. If he remembered right, summons were generally inherited and therefore Kakashi’s dogs must be all he had left of his family.

“Thank you.” His attention was drawn away by the pug’s deep voice again. “For looking out for him.”

Iruka’s eyes widened. “I’m not doing – I’m not doing anything,” he rushed.

“Boy, don’t fool me. You didn’t turn him away.”

Iruka spluttered. He had the feeling that Pakkun could see right through him. “But he came to us for help. Why would we – why would I turn him away?”

Pakkun considered him out of the corner of his eyes. “You’re naturally kind.” He didn’t phrase it as a question, but Iruka still couldn’t make out whether Pakkun meant it as a compliment or as a fatal flaw. “You would be surprised at the spite that has been thrown his way.”

He was getting flustered now, colour rising to his cheeks. But Iruka didn‘t dare speak.

“I’ve known him for all his life, and I know how thick-headed he can be. He’s persuaded himself long ago that he needs to be alone.”

Iruka settled back from where he had, his bafflement getting the better of him, leaned forward. He chanced another glance at Kakashi who was running his fingers through the mohawk of a grey, baring his very sharpfangs with the attention. “But that’s no way to live,” he said quietly.

Pakkun nodded. His tail wagged once. “That’s why I’m telling you.”

Iruka did a double-take. “ _Me_? I mean,” he reeled, “I appreciate it but I’ve really done nothing special for him. You’re his family, his pack. Not me, not –“

Iruka stilled at the expression on the pug’s face. How was he getting dragged by a magical creature minutes after he had met them?

“And I thought Kakashi was dense.”

Iruka’s flush came back with a full vengeance, and he watched Pakkun walk back to Kakashi with his mouth in a little gape. The last time he had been this stunned by getting caught red-handed was when Hashirama had found him messing with the spell book up the attic. It happened during the summer after leaving elementary school and because Iruka was Iruka, and had especially been a little shit as a child, he wanted to get his hands on anything that he was explicitly forbidden from getting his hands on. No one had explained to him what kind of book was hidden up there, just that he should not, under any circumstances, touch it. Only after Hashirama had appeared out of thin air to pluck it out of Iruka’s grip with a smile that meant _serious trouble_ for Iruka, was he told that the book served as a record for every spell or hex carried out in the house. Not that both Hashirama and Madara were much of spellworkers but in case a charm went wrong, the book was useful to backtrace mistakes. And in case a charm went catastrophically, one could burn the book and flee the country.

After getting thoroughly scolded, however, Iruka had taken the spell book on the attic as inspiration and created his own meagre compendium that grew with the years. The first entry he had made after the fateful night of cursing himself, taking a pink gel pen to an empty diary with a pirate print on it, was a scribbled down list of the specifics of his curse. Compiled under his blanket, with a battery torch stuck between his teeth. Iruka could still recite the list word for word, even remembered what his younger self had messed up and scratched out, the ink bleeding through to the next page.

Eyes the colour of marbles: one grey-blue, one red. Seven speaking dogs. White and grey and silver hair. Horrendous handwriting. And a… lonely… lonely… soul.

Iruka scrambled to his feet. “Holy fuck. Holy _fuck_!”

“Iruka?” Kakashi and the dogs had stopped in their tracks, all staring at him. “What’s wrong?”

No way. No _fucking_ way. Iruka’s hands went up to his head, his fingers tangling through his hair and tugging at it. “Oh my god.” He heaved in a big breath and repeated the list in his head. Eyes. Dogs. The hair. The handwriting.

Iruka lifted his head from where he had been staring at the ground, just to meet Kakashi’s concerned eyes, both of them, _one red and one grey-blue_. He was approaching Iruka like a wild animal, hands placated in front of his body.

Pakkun’s words echoed through Iruka’s mind. _He persuaded himself long ago that he needs to be alone._

“Iruka?” Kakashi asked again. His voice had lowered and Iruka resisted the urge to break into delirious laughter. This could not be happening.

“I need to – ” Panic was making his legs and arms tingle, numbing them. "I need to go – “ He looked around, scanning the garden for an escape. His brain had thrown all rationality and logic thinking straight out of the window. Hurled it.

A pull at his root. Iruka let his hands fall next to his side, blinded by his fear. The forest loomed in the background, and it was speaking to him, calling him.

Before he could set off, Kakashi was there and had grasped him by his shoulders. “ _Where_?” he demanded. “Iruka, what’s going on? I can see that you want to run. Don’t.”

Iruka’s vision was blurry but refocused at the firmness in Kakashi’s voice.

“You need to leave,” Iruka whispered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... uh-oh.
> 
> i get so convinced that no one likes my writing sometimes that it takes me days to start writing again! but reading through your comments really makes a difference. thank you! *happy dancing* next chapter: gay panicking. curses. something about that dead son of a bitch. tenzou makes more coffee. see you! <3


	5. Part V

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so..... this took me a while? [rubs neck] this chapter turned out to be everything that was not on my outline, and to be quite honest, you are in for a wild ride. i say this very lovingly. thank you for all the comments and kudos since they keep me going. this story will be finished one way or another. excuse me while i will dance to Blondie's "One Way Or Another" now <3

And like the Jane Austen heroine Iruka always wanted to be after the first time he had watched Pride and Prejudice at the tender age of eight, he made a run for his home, dressed in metaphorical garbs, in the metaphorical pouring rain, and through the metaphorical muddy British wastelands.

The rest of what followed was less pretty. With a heart about to burst from containing a beehive of guilt, Iruka made his way up the creaky staircase as the stairs gave a cacophony of wailing at his distress. All Iruka saw in front of his eyes was Kakashi’s face, how it had held no hurt or disappointment at all, just sadness in the fine line of his mouth, some recognition, some resignation, the little dot of his beauty mark making him look like a sculpture in a museum one would describe as holding imminent melancholia.

Iruka felt terrible. He felt like the most terrible person on earth and, mind you, someone had tried to kill his brother this week. He threw the bathroom door shut behind him and gave a frustrated whine when it refused to close all the way. It seemed to mock him. Saying, you stupid, stupid boy. Don’t shut yourself away. But Iruka had lived in this house longer than he had not and as stubborn as it was, Iruka could be at least twice as thickheaded. So he gave the wood another push, then maybe also a kick, and when that didn’t work he yelled, “Will you just close, dammit!” and that did the trick. The door closed with a quiet click and left Iruka in silence except for his own breathing.

He turned around, with his back resting against the wood, and slid to the tiled bathroom floor. From this perspective his eyes landed on the little wooden stool that Hashirama had never gotten rid of and just moved to a corner under a shelf, unused after all those years in which Iruka was too small still to reach the sink and brush his teeth without it. His lower lip began to tremble against his will and Iruka tried his best to frown against his traitorous heart but when he lowered his head to look at his quivering hands, he caught a glimpse of the penchant he had kept around his neck all these years since he had wrung the curse from the confines of his body, the confines of his fear. And with his next exhale Iruka started to sob.

Tenzou found him in the aftermath of years’ worth of tears and snot.

The door opened and Iruka didn’t move from his curled-up position on the bathmat. His body was covered by the bathrobe he had snatched from the towel hook after his crying gave him a headache and left him cold and shivering.

His eyes moved to Tenzou’s face.

“I locked that door.”

Tenzou kneeled down next to him. A softness had snuck into his deep brown eyes but apart from that he didn’t look much impressed. Still, he reached out to tug away the fabric of the bathrobe from where it was partially covering Iruka’s mouth and muffling his voice.

“Good thing that this house has a mind of his own, then,” Tenzou said so full of understanding that tears sprang from Iruka’s eyes anew.

“Tenzou,” he wrung out. “I’m the most stupid person alive.”

Tenzou just hummed and brushed strands of Iruka’s hair behind his ear, reaching for the toilet paper so Iruka could blow his nose.

“This is the moment where you’re supposed to say, no, Iruka, you are not, there are so many more people that are stupider than you are,” Iruka said. He accentuated his point with a loud sniffle. Tenzou met his eyes, and hummed again.

“Tenzou!” Iruka cried out in a sulky rage. And then he cried some more. Tenzou’s hands came up to guide him into a seated position, and it were Tenzou’s hands too that ran a face cloth under warm water and then threw it at Iruka’s face. Iruka cried until he couldn’t anymore, and wiped the evidence off his face.

When he stood in front of the bathroom mirror, puffy-red eyes were reflected back at him. His skin was blotchy, and the fabric of the bathrobe had left imprints on his left cheek, not to forget the mess that was his hair.

But when Iruka looked down, he noticed the dog hair sticking to his shirt and he gripped Tenzou’s wrist _hard_. “Pinch me,” he said against a new onslaught of emotion because apparently it was impossible to dehydrate yourself through your tears, and he yelped when a sharp pain bit at his arm.

“Not that hard, you asshole!”

“I am your older brother, it’s my duty to be an asshole,” Tenzou said from behind him. “Do I have to fight you into the shower or can you get in yourself?”

Iruka whirled around to tell Tenzou how little he appreciated right now, when he had to close his eyes against the pounding headache he gave himself with his crying.

“Let me,” Tenzou said softly and brought his hands up to Iruka’s temples, his touch just as light as well as blessing after weeks of grey skies when the first hint of sun poked through the blanket of clouds.

Iruka’s head still hurt after, but a little weight, a little pressure had lifted from him. How Tenzou did it, none of them knew – just that it helped, and that Tenzou helped make sense of most chaos.

When Iruka got out of the shower, he ran his wide comb through his still wet hair on autopilot.

“Do you want me to braid it?” Tenzou asked after reappearing, leaning against the doorframe.

Iruka stopped. When they were younger, Tenzou had braided his hair often after he had asked Hashirama to cut off his own tresses. Sometimes while Iruka read his books on talking dragons, and shapeshifting cats, and plants that grew as tall as the tallest buildings and even taller, reaching all the way to the moon, Tenzou had sat behind him and braided his hair. When he was done, he took the braid out of it again and started anew.

Iruka hadn’t minded then because he had quickly noticed how swift his brother’s fingers were, and how it seemed to give him some peace of mind when it otherwise kept replaying moments best forgotten. And with every braid Tenzou finished assembling, Iruka imagined that they were growing closer, that Tenzou wouldn’t leave, that Tenzou understood that this was his home, that Tenzou didn’t _need_ to go anywhere else.

“I would like that,” Iruka breathed out and while Tenzou got to work, he wondered at how his brother’s hands had nearly tripled in size, and still hey handled his hair so delicately.

A cup of chai was pressed into his hands when he sat atop of his bed and he stared down at the tea, the chip in the white porcelain of the mug that belonged to Madara since it was Iruka that had gifted it to him years ago. _World’s best grandpa_ , it read. He remembered the face Madara had pulled at the gift as if he didn’t find it extremely funny. “I’m not that old,” he had simply said with a straight face (that, to be fair, always looked a little gloomy) and then went on to drink his valerian root bedtime tea from it for three months straight.

While Tenzou set to work, Iruka sipped his tea and stared off into the distance. He could sense the moment his brain decided to space out, so it wasn’t surprising at all when the empty mug was taken from his grip and he didn’t remember drinking it.

The mattress dipped when his brother settled in next to him and for a moment they were quiet, together. For all they fought and yelled at each other, they did attune to the other’s moods quite well and didn’t mind sharing the same space without speaking. But this silence bore a weight.

“What happened?” Tenzou asked, and Iruka wondered for it already seemed days and weeks away. Time had a funny way of pointing out something grave had happened and recovering would not be easy.

“I fucked up,” Iruka said and he meant it.

Tenzou tilted his head and he seemed genuinely confused. “Are you sure about that?”

Iruka balled his hands into fists in his lap. “I genuinely fucked up. In a way that I don’t think I can fix this, fucked up.”

He didn’t want to talk about it. In fact, he didn’t want to talk about it so badly that he knew he _really_ _should talk_ _about_ _it_. “Tenzou. It’s the curse.”

“Which one?” Tenzou asked and Iruka resisted the urge to hit him. “Don’t look at me like that, I’m legitimately asking. You’ve never spoken about the second one of your own volition so I’m surprised you’d bring it up now.” He paused. “No, actually I’m not that surprised you’re bringing it up now.”

Iruka knew that Tenzou was speaking English because the phonemes sounded familiar, but the words didn’t make much sense to him. Or maybe they made so much sense to him that he was seized by sudden fright.

“What do you mean?” he asked weakly. Did he need his suspicions – well, not suspicions at this point but reality, period – confirmed by someone else? Did he need Tenzou to say that all the things he’d written down in the curse fitted Kakashi to a T?

Instead, Tenzou said this: “It is rather obvious. Your feelings for our guest, I mean.” Iruka’s heart was in his mouth, pounding so fast he felt like he was about to throw up. “You saw him?” His voice was barely a whisper.

Tenzou nodded. “He didn’t seem very… well. I asked him if he was leaving and he couldn’t give me an answer, but he was busy trying to regal in the dogs because they also seemed rather upset. He said he’d take them away for a walk to calm down.”

Iruka buried his face in his hands. Fuck. Fuck. “Tenzou, all the things I wrote down in my spellbook about making up an impossible person I’d fall in love with – “ His breath caught in his throat. “It’s Kakashi. It’s as if I had summoned him – “

Wait. Wait. Oh Gods.

Iruka shot up from where he was sitting, almost catapulting Tenzou from the bed in process.

“Holy fucking shit, Tenzou, what if I actually _summoned_ him? What if I magicked him into existence and he isn’t even a real person but a figment of my imagination that somehow turned real? Tenzou, what did I _do_?” In the fraction of a second, Iruka had gone from depressed to highly alert. He paced the tiny space between his bed and the window and pulled at his hair, hashing out equations in his brain. Please, for the love of everything good and holy…

“How about you _breathe_?” Tenzou said loudly.

“I cannot breathe! I don’t think I remember how to! Tenzou, I’m going to lose my mind!”

“Iruka, sit the fuck down gain or I’ll make you. You might be able to do some things, but how the fuck would you spell a whole _human_ into existence? Did you ever imagine someone like Kakashi in your head?”

“No!” Iruka cried out and threw his hands in the air. “That was the whole point of the curse, that I won’t ever find a person that fits the description, so that no one will die because of me!” he shouted.

Although his bedroom was small and packed with furniture and beloved memorabilia like the shelves full of battered journals and books, Iruka’s voice reverberated off the walls. In the aftermath, Iruka was panting. He felt like a wild thing, as if the months and years of turmoil that he had stifled and throttled and kept away were unravelling and there was nothing Iruka could do about it.

“Iruka,” Tenzou said in a low tone. A warning for he knew the direction Iruka’s thoughts were heading.

“ _What_ , Tenzou? Have you forgotten what this is about? Because I haven’t. I thought, at least I had fixed one part of it. At least I won’t fall in love. But that doesn’t mean that you won’t die, or Hashirama, or Madara, because you’re my family and I love you too. And, and – “ Iruka broke off, his tone wavering. “When I love someone, it means that they can get hurt. Why can’t I just keep any of you _safe_?” His voice cracked on the last syllables.

Tenzou called his name again but this time it wasn’t meant to be a warning. He still sounded cautious, fragile even. As if he was afraid a single word could tear Iruka apart.

~*~*~

Iruka dreamed of a wheat field, the grains still green. The wind rippled through the expanse, and for a moment it appeared as a sea of waving branches. As he waded through it, Iruka’s hand grazed the very tops of the stalks, the chaff catching against his palms. He was unaware of where he was going, but the sky above him was of a serene blue with just a few puffs of clouds, and Iruka treaded with a light heart.

After a while, the horizon in front of him gave way to the treetops of pines and cedars, their crowns blending into a mix of dark green and blue. It was the first sign to Iruka that this was not reality but a dream: the way the colors looked like they had been painted, by an artist trying to use their materials to their advantage to create the effect of an object being very far away.

There was no sign of the time passing. When Iruka breached the forest it could have been either minutes or hours.

The air was colder here, sheltered by trees. The hairs on his arms stood up when the next breeze tugged at his clothes but the farther he went the clearer Iruka’s notion grew that he was led to a very specific location.

Fur brushed against his bare calves. Iruka looked down and a wolf trotted by his side. This took him by surprise for he hadn’t felt the presence of someone else, a presence that was quiet and harmless like the wolf’s. Iruka rarely dreamed of calm.

The wolf was most likely a shifter; his fur was white like the clouds that were now obscured by the trees, and his size certainly larger than your usual canine companion. Iruka let his eyes linger on his form for a while longer but other than sticking to his side the wolf gave no sign of recognizing Iruka.

“Where are we going?” Iruka asked.

The wolf’s left ear turned around but as Iruka had expected, he got no response. Alright.

Iruka watched the wolf out of the corner of his eyes. “What’s your name?” If the wolf was walking next to him in his human shape, Iruka would give him a friendly nudge with his elbow right about now, trying to coax an answer out of him. “You don’t wanna tell me?”

The wolf flicked his tail against Iruka’s leg.

Oh. Iruka tilted his head to the side. “But I don’t think I ever saw you before…” He gained on his companion and turned around, walking backwards, so he could get a better look at the wolf’s feature. At once, he noticed the scar. “Kakashi!”

Kakashi’s tail wagged and he pounced forward, feigning a playful snatch at Iruka’s legs.

Iruka laughed. “You’re in my dream! And you’re a wolf,” he added on second thought.

At this, Kakashi bolted past him. All Iruka could do was take after him, over rough and smooth, over creeks and ditches. Kakashi was swift and Iruka was still, well, mostly human with definitely human legs that were very breakable and impractical for chasing after a hound. His head got so wrapped up in the chase that he didn’t notice the darkness that followed on his trails.

“Kakashi, wait!” he called out. By now, he could only make out Kakashi’s grey form in the distance, legs and tail blurring into one dot at the very end of his vision, and after the next turn Kakashi was gone.

Iruka stopped in his tracks, almost doubling over. His lungs burned in his ribcage, wanting to expand beyond this meek human vessel, but not allowed to do so. “Kakashi!”

No answer.

“Where did he go?” Iruka asked himself. He had led Iruka so surely, as if he wanted to show something to him. Maybe he’d just forgotten that it wasn’t as easy for Iruka to keep up with a wolf, and maybe he would come back in just a minute. Surely, if Iruka sat down here on the ground cushioned from last year’s fall, and from the year before, leaves turning to fruitful debris, Kakashi would come back and get him.

But the longer he waited, the colder Iruka felt. The colder he grew, the less certain he became that Kakashi even remembered.

The darkness crawled. Like a blanket, it spread over the forest floor, clawing its way over to where Iruka sat. His eyes grew heavy but he ascribed it to the adrenaline leaving his body after calming down from his sprint, and not to the dark mass, seemingly made from cloths and tatter, held together by cobwebs, creating something eerily similar to a body that pulsated beneath the threads. Iruka was completely unaware of it.

Just as it draped itself over Iruka’s back, almost touching but not quite, a voice had Iruka looking up.

“Iruka?”

The darkness fled at once.

Iruka blinked against the sudden sun peaking through the gaps between the treetops grouping together. There, a few feet ahead of him, Kakashi was slowly walking towards him. Confusion was written all over his features but Iruka didn’t care – he sprang up and ran towards him.

“You’re back! Where did you go?”

Kakashi’s lips were slightly parted and his brow furrowed in concern. “Back? I just arrived here.”

“But – “ Iruka faltered. “I just saw you! Or, well, I saw a wolf who looked like you. And you were leading me somewhere before you just vanished.”

Kakashi did a double-take. He seemed loathe to take his eyes off Iruka, but just for a moment he let his gaze wander. There wasn’t a single soul near, not even the darkness that had been so eager to embrace Iruka. It had seen something that scared it.

“That wasn’t – I don’t remember,” Kakashi murmured and turned back to Iruka. “Iruka, how am I in your dream?”

Iruka shrunk back. “People appear in other people’s dreams plenty…” he started weakly, trying for a smile, although a heavy leaden weight settled at the pit of his stomach.

Kakashi didn’t say anything for a moment. Just took in Iruka’s hunched shoulders with a concerned glance. He seemed to weigh his next words. “No… you’re not dreaming of me, I am _in_ your dream. I was with the dogs a bit ago before I was pulled… away…” Kakashi took a few steps forward, closing the distance even further. “It felt as if I was falling asleep myself.”

Iruka’s cheeks were burning. Not with embarrassment but from the dreadful notion that the little control Iruka convinced himself to have over the precarities in his life was slipping through his fingers.

“Iruka.”

Kakashi looked just like he had when Iruka told him to leave. The same clothes, the same expression. The worry that he didn’t deserve. His arms came up around his middle, and the ground beneath him seemed to sway from the anger and the shame that rushed back into Iruka with a vengeance. He hated how weak he felt, how unfair he was being. But he didn’t want – he didn’t want anyone to get hurt.

The thing was, Iruka thought bitterly, maybe it wasn’t in his hands to keep people from being hurt.

“I walked away because you told me to. But what’s wrong? Talk to me,” Kakashi asked softly. “Please?”

“You make me want things I can’t have,” Iruka whispered.

A touch at his elbow. He almost startled.

“What do you mean?”

Iruka’s lips parted, his mouth open, but the only sound that reached his ears was the rustling of the trees as the wind browsed through them. There was a lump in his throat and it seemed to prevent all the words from releasing into the open.

How could he tell Kakashi? How could he tell him in a way that would make him understand how desperately he didn’t want to be alone but that he _had_ to? That this was how Iruka had decided it had to be. A self-forged fate. He didn’t think there would be words fitting enough to describe without getting it wrong somehow. If there was another way, perhaps –

But there was a way.

Iruka looked up. “I can show you.”

Kakashi nodded and Iruka took his hand before they were swept away.

~*~*~

_Water. And sun. He’s at the beach with his parents and the wind blows, tugs at him, nearly knocks him off his feet because he is so tiny still, tiny but happy with his pants rolled up above his knees and wading through the shallow waves. It must be late summer. His father is holding his hand and hums a song that played on the radio during the drive. His mother is with them but not_ with them _, resting a little further away, a blanket around her shoulders. She’s been very tired lately._

_A glimmer catches Iruka’s eyes and he bends down, picks a shimmery shell out of the sand when the water retreats once again. A smile as bright as the stars illuminating the night sky them breaks out on Iruka’s face and he waves at his mom, the world still okay. The only care he has is that he has soon finished reading his way through the children’s book section at the local library, and he will need replenishment._

*

_A backpack on his bed. His father helped him pack the necessities like his green toothbrush with red bristles that makes it look like a snake darting its tongue out, and tells him to pack what else he wants to bring to Hashirama’s. Iruka’s mother spends most days in bed and he wishes he knew what to do to make her better but the doctor in the blue scrubs told him there’s nothing he could do, except be a brave man. Iruka is eight and thinks he doesn’t want to be a man if it means that his mom won’t get to read him bedtime stories anymore. A single thought worms its way into his head and makes itself at home: The curse. Loving someone means they will die._

*

_He sits on the front porch of his uncle’s house after his mother’s funeral and watches the birds settle on the cherry tree and pick on the fruit, the cherries so ripe they are almost black, fragrant from the sweet-sticky juice. Madara comes outside and sits down next to him. So many adults have told Iruka that they’re sorry for what happened to his mom and it made him both angry, as well as sad. It’s not like it’s their fault that his mother got sick. He wishes there was anyone to blame but himself._

_“Do you think it makes a difference whether you burn someone or put them in a casket?” Iruka asks. He watches the robins on the tree shove at each other to get to the best fruit. Madara puts his hands behind him and leans back, squinting against the sun. How long has it been since Madara lost his family? Had he worn this suit at their funeral? Iruka looks up at him._

_“I don’t think so,” Madara says. “Dead is dead.”_

*

_Tenzou has a good singing voice. It surprises Iruka when he walks into the garden and finds him sitting in-between the tomato stalks, shaded by the growing plants. With his knees digging into the dirt, Tenzou ties the stalks to the stakes with old cotton scraps, so the plants will grow tall and towards the light with a little something to lean against, to guide them. Iruka walks barefoot on the stone path that is hot from the weather and would singe the soles of his feet if Iruka wasn’t used to walking barefoot. Alas, he has never been fond of shoes._

_He sings to himself in a language that Iruka doesn’t understand. A strange surge of jealousy rises in him: Tenzou has something of his own. He is ten years old and doesn’t think it’s fair his parents aren’t here anymore. If he thinks too long about what he’s feeling, his head starts to hurt._

_“I am cursed,” Iruka tells Tenzou who snaps his head up. He hadn’t noticed Iruka._

_“W-what do you mean?”_

_He lets himself plop down next to Tenzou. “It’s a family thing. My parents had it and my grandparents too, and my great-grandparents and my great-great-grandparents and – “_

_Tenzou’s eyes are wide. “But what kind of curse?”_

_Iruka shrugs and spots a snail in front of him. “When I fall in love with someone, they will die.”_

_They are quiet for a moment._

_“Do you know how?”_

_Iruka lifts his head and looks at Tenzou. “What do you mean?”_

_Tenzou gives a little shrug himself. He looks off to the side. His fingertips are stained with a grassy green from the stalks._

_“How they’ll die. Do you know?”_

_Iruka ponders. No, of all the things he asked himself, he hadn’t thought of this one. “It doesn’t matter,” he says quickly. “All I know is that I’ll never fall in love.”_

_“I don’t think you can choose,” Tenzou speaks so carefully, a complete contrast to the confidence he carries when he handles the garden. “I don’t think it’s that easy, Iruka.”_

_At once, Iruka gets up. This was stupid. Why did he think telling Tenzou would make him feel better?_

_“It won’t happen,” Iruka bites out and storms off._

*

_“Can I talk to you both for a second?” Madara asks._

_Iruka has been putting on his snowsuit as their town got a surprise-snowfall overnight and the snow hasn’t yet melted. His cheeks are already flushed from excitement – not only because he’ll get to show Tenzou the sleigh that he built together with Hashirama. More important, Tenzou told him he had_ never _seen snow before._

_Iruka ties his shoelaces while his tongue is sticking out of his mouth. Tenzou looks and meets Madara’s red eyes. “Is everything alright?”_

_“It will be,” Madara says and that catches Iruka’s attention. The little fledgling in his heart that carries all his worries perks up. “It’s about Hashirama. He wanted to tell you on his own but he hasn’t yet and I think it would be harmful for you not to know. Iruka, you’ve known your uncle for longer than you, Tenzou, right? Do you remember how he gets really tired sometimes and spends a lot of time in his bedroom?”_

_Iruka’s pulse quickens. He jumps up from where he’s been sitting on the ground. “Is he sick? Is he going to die?” The thought is so horrible that he squeezes his eyes shut and claps his hands over his ears._

_Tenzou tugs at his elbow and keeps repeating his name until Iruka opens one of his eyes again. Madara seems to have waited patiently. “Iruka, he isn’t going to die. It’s an illness that you can’t catch like a cold. He’s meeting a doctor every week and also taking medication for it.”_

_Tenzou holds his hand and slowly, Iruka’s thoughts return to normal speed. He swallows. “Is it something thermal? Can he get worse and worse and then die?”_

_Madara looks at him and his unreadable expression melts into something softer, more feeble. “You mean terminal. It happens that people die but most of the time those people aren’t getting the help that they need. Your uncle is getting that help. He’s been sick before and got better again. I’ll make sure you can talk to him too and ask all the questions that you want to ask.”_

_“What is it called? The illness?” Tenzou asks._

_“Depression.”_

_Depression. The name sits heavy on his tongue, Iruka notices, and his mouth pools with saliva as if he’s going to be sick, as if his body wants to get it out and away._

*

There came the night he cursed himself. A memory so vivid he didn’t need to see it again. It was burned into his soul.

But he let Kakashi watch.

*

 _He’s never been this tired in his whole life but he needs to write it down._ Magical etiquette _, Iruka hears Hashirama’s words echo in his head._ Every good witch needs a book of spells. _Never mind that they aren’t witches and Iruka doesn’t know what ‘etiquette’ means other than making his letters legible. He presses the pen down so hard that the page almost tears but then it’s done, the spell immortalized, his life changed for the better. Umino Iruka won’t fall in love._

*

_“I don’t think you love me,” his boyfriend tells him. “I don’t think you even like me.”_

_“That’s not true,” Iruka says. He liked him. He does like him. As much as you can like the safest option that there is, chosen simply because Iruka thought he’d never be able to fall in love with him._

_Iruka goes home after his first break-up during junior year in high school and when his uncles offer love and advice and ice cream, he declines. At night, he climbs out of his bedroom’s window and sits on the roof, looking at the stars._

I’m fine, _Iruka tells himself. Strangely, it’s true. He isn’t hurt, and he doesn’t miss him. In some sense, he feels lighter._

_The next morning, he tries to look more affected for the sake of others._

*

_“Iruka, we need to talk about this – ” Hashirama tries. He sounds desperate and it hurts so much. Iruka hurts so much._

_“Whatever you want to say about this, don’t,” Iruka says and walks out of the house. He drives a long time until his eyes become oblivious towards the road and then he parks the car at the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere._

_Iruka curls up in the backseat and thinks about being a different person that isn’t called Umino or Senju or Uchiha and falls asleep, freezing._

~*~*~

When Iruka let go of the memories, he was no longer dreaming. He knew from taking a look down at his bare feet, freezing in that way that almost burned. Mud clung to the legs of his pants and his braid – yes, he remembered now how Tenzou had braided it – was a little damp against the back of his neck.

He was no longer dreaming, and he was alone. No other presence that sent a shiver up his spine. Iruka flexed his fingers and wondered at the dirt caked under his fingernails and the scratches over the backs of his hands.

“I’ve sleepwalked, haven’t I?” he asked aloud. Of course, there came no answer. Except for that tiny, tiny foreboding at the back of his mind, that curled and slithered, whispering that things were out of his control.

He had told Tenzou. He had told Kakashi – or well, tried to and ended up showing him instead. If, and he doubted it, if he’d see Kakashi again then they should also come clean about Mizuki so Iruka could put a close to this chapter of his life and prepare for the next one in which he tried to reassure himself that loneliness was nothing compared to causing pain and hurt.

Iruka wrapped his arms around his torso to quieten the shivers wracking his body and wandered through the underbrush that separated the garden from the forest. The darkness made it hard for him to see where exactly he put down his feet so that he ended up cutting himself on thorns of dried out wildrose shrubs but at least the silhouette of his home became clearer, his vision sharpened by the sting.

A rustling caught his attention, made Iruka suck in the breath he was taking. He whirled around. “Don’t come closer!” he spoke, loud and clear, because just as some humans were afraid of the dark, even the dark could find itself to be frightened in front of a determined set of eyes. He had been taught by Hashirama and Madara early on.

The rustling didn’t stop. Iruka gripped at his collarbone, fumbling until he found the pendant around his neck. Steadily, it grew warm and warmer until it stung his palm, when a creature broke free off the shadows and towards Iruka.

The heat grew dangerously sharp, sharp as blade, Iruka thought, a blade, a sword, a knife, anything – before the creature barked at him.

“Bisuke?”

“Iruka!” The dog yipped and barreled straight into Iruka, almost knocking him over despite his small size. He was convinced that his ribcage couldn’t be big enough to contain the flutter of stumbles in it.

Iruka was floating. Floating above his body as he watched himself bend down to rub his hands against Bisuke’s fur. Only when he heard a sniffle did he realize that his eyes had gone watery from sheer relief. Bisuke was warm. So warm, Iruka just wanted to bury his face against his neck. He was pretty sure Bisuke would have let him.

Slowly he came back. “Bisuke, what are you doing here?”

“I had to find you! Boss said we had to leave and I didn’t wanna but I couldn’t sneak away, not until he was asleep!”

There was a lump in Iruka’s throat. “Bisuke, you have to go back, Kakashi will be so scared when he can’t find you – “

Bisuke barked at him. It stopped Iruka dead in his tracks. “I’m not leaving you. I will come with you, I will go home with _you_.” Although the rings of dark fur around his eyes gave Bisuke’s appearance a comical quality, Iruka stared at nothing less than a fierce, fierce hound.

He remembered how Kakashi said Bisuke was the youngest of the pack. That he had a head of his own. Iruka contemplated arguing again when Bisuke spoke, lower this time, his words almost a whine: “He didn’t want to go, Iruka… He looked so sad. Just like you. But Kakashi has the pack and you don’t. Please let me stay!”

Iruka was afraid that if he opened his mouth he wouldn’t be able to get out a single word. So he nodded once, sharply, and let Bisuke lead the way until he figured out how the hell he could make him return to his rightful home.

~*~*~

“What _is_ that?” Bisuke asked from where his front paws were perched on the windowsill. “I can still smell it from this far. And it reeks,” he grumbled and shook out his fur.

Iruka followed his gaze until his eyes caught on the rhubarb patch. The blue-purple blooms of the aconite stood high and proud, like a field of aurora light in their own garden.

“Poison,” Iruka said. He worried his lips between his teeth. No matter what he tried to keep himself busy with, his mind always went back to Kakashi, and how he must think that Iruka had stolen his freaking dog like a truly insane person which – after revealing the curse to him – wasn’t that far off, he guessed. It had been about… he checked his phone. Twelve hours since Bisuke followed Iruka home.

“Why would you put poison in your garden?”

Because, Iruka thought, it keeps people, as well as curious dogs, away.

He went for a lie, or at least wanted to, when the doorbell rang and Iruka almost jumped out of his own skin. Instead of barking, Bisuke sprinted out of Iruka’s bedroom and caught himself, accompanied by the sound of claws scratching across hardwood flooring, right before he would have tumbled down the staircase.

“Bisuke, slow down!” Iruka yelled and scrambled after him, knocking against the doorframe in the process. “Ow, ow, ow, fuck!” That would bruise. He rubbed at his elbow through his washed-out flannel shirt, haphazardly thrown over a low-cut mustard shirt, and scooped up the small bundle of puppy before hurrying down the stairs.

Of course, Bisuke got in at least two licks at Iruka’s chin which made him smile although his nerves were frayed. Still armed with a mass of fur that wagged its tail with great enthusiasm, Iruka threw open the door and looked into familiar mismatched eyes.

Whatever words had been on Kakashi’s lips died the moment he saw Bisuke in Iruka’s arms.

“Oh no,” Bisuke whispered and shrunk to half his size, hiding his snout in Iruka’s shirt. Iruka found himself floundering, mouth opening and closing almost at the same time, while Kakashi stood there, blinking. They stared at each other without a single word.

Oh Gods. Silence. Silence that set Iruka on edge. Not much longer and he would crack under the pressu –

“I’m sorry!” Iruka all but yelled into Kakashi’s face and thrust Bisuke forward. There it was. “I’m sorry, he followed me home and I told him you’d be looking everywhere and – _Bisuke, stop crying_ – and, and I’m just – sorry. Very sorry.”

“Iruka, you’re so mean!” Bisuke cried. Iruka couldn’t have possibly given less of a damn whether he was mean or not because he was sweating, and turning so red he’d rival Hashirama’s mutated tomatoes (of the Extra Red strain). With his breath held, he waited for any kind of reaction from Kakashi, who… who… smiled.

It was small, and existing so subtly in the in-between space of deep blue regret and crimson-colored sorrow, but it was a smile and Iruka couldn’t tear his gaze away.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” Kakashi asked and Iruka froze for he thought Kakashi directed the accusation at him, but then Bisuke gave a gruff bark. “I thought I liked Iruka more than you but that’s yesterday’s news, I guess.” He sounded very much like a petulant child, and the corners of Iruka’s lips curved upwards, despite himself.

He dropped Bisuke on the floor who flopped down onto his butt and started scratching at the space behind his ear. Iruka hadn’t seen a pouting dog before but life was full of surprises, wasn’t it? Kakashi just hummed. “You know it’s not me that you actually have to face. Pakkun is waiting for you.”

Bisuke gave another whine before pressing himself flat to the ground. “Everyone is mean. Everyone.”

A quiet laugh escaped him at the dramatics before Iruka remembered where he was and he swallowed the sound, sealed his lips shut. Kakashi put a halt to his mind. “Can I come in?”

Iruka thought he hadn’t heard right. Only when Kakashi tilted his head a little to the side, a questioning look, searching, did Iruka snap out of it. “Uh… yes? Yes, sure,” he managed and mentally whacked himself over the head. His legs felt like those of a newborn deer as he stepped aside and let Kakashi through while Bisuke trod off the front porch with a huff. “I’m going home.”

“Do that,” Kakashi said overly serious, and seemed to suppress a laugh while Bisuke was still within earshot.

Iruka trailed off to the living room, deeply unsure. Was Kakashi just here to collect his things? Or talk to Tenzou? Maybe he wanted to tell Iruka what _exactly_ he thought of him after yesterday’s endeavors. (Nothing good, Iruka assumed.) He worried his bottom lip between his teeth. “So – “

“What do you think about some coffee?”

Iruka turned around and whatever catastrophes he’d been conjuring up were dispelled at the question. He nodded weakly. Coffee was safe ground.

He watched Kakashi fumble with the filter for ground coffee, and pour some boiling water from the kettle slowly and deliberately into the filter. Watched him steam some milk on the stove in an old enamel pot, while the coffee finished brewing and pour it into two mugs. Watched him place the mugs on the table, one black coffee, and one very milky, and sit down not opposite Iruka, but at the corner to his right.

All the while Iruka wondered at how familiar Kakashi had become with this kitchen and even more striking, how familiar he looked in it. He took his first sip, swallowed, and took the leap.

“Kakashi, why are you here?”

Kakashi hummed. Like before, when he had crossed the threshold, the hint of a smile was ghosting over his face. “I wanted to see you.”

Iruka wanted to hide. He wanted to hide somewhere, anywhere, like the coward that he was. “But… I sent you away.” He needed Kakashi to understand that he had acted out of selfishness, caused Kakashi hurt because he was deeply egoistic in this matter, that Iruka wasn’t as good of a person as most likely everyone saw him to be. It sounded like a plea to his own ears.

“I know,” Kakashi said with a shrug and met his eyes. Iruka looked away. “You panicked. I understand.”

The words were out before Iruka could hold them back. “How? How do you just understand, I – I told you to go and left you alone like everyone else in your life and you, you _understand_?” His voice cracked and he put a hand over his mouth, as if he could shut himself up. “You’ve seen all of – the memories and you’re here. They should have scared you away. You shouldn’t be here.”

A hand came up to his and gently tugged it away. Kakashi’s skin was warm to touch, the barest of callouses on his palm. Only when their fingers were intertwined did Iruka dare to look at Kakashi, and found him to have drawn near, the smile now gone. Just the red and grey of his eyes, shining ever so brightly, as if Kakashi had made a discovery that shifted his world back onto its initial tracks. He cupped Iruka’s cheek and brushed his thumb over the edge of Iruka’s scar.

“But I want to,” Kakashi said and kissed him.


End file.
